Quotes about bias

It is not the monsters we should be afraid of it is the people that don't recognize the same monsters inside of themself.

One of the best ways you can fight discrimination is by taking good care of yourself. Your survival is not just important it's an act of revolution.

Images of the Holy easily become holy images -- sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example it leads all previous idea of the Messiah in ruins.

All people express a fondness for truth and sincerity, yet many people prefer to live with their illusions and delusions. A person’s sincere desire to believe only what is true oftentimes does not trump their ingrained resistance to truths that fail to coincide with their deeply held desires. People reject truth because it undercuts what they wish was true and despise or discredit anyone whom offers a different version of truth than they are prepared to accept.

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

Men as Victims: Challenging Cultural MythsJudith Herman’s recent treatise on “complex PTSD" (Herman, 1992) is an extremely articulate and compelling analysis of some of the failings of the current PTSD diagnosis, and of some of the psychological legacies of prolonged, repeated trauma. However, there was one aspect of the article which concerned me and which I wish to address.Throughout the article, "Complex PTSD: A Syndrome in Survivors of Prolonged and Repeated Trauma," whenever reference is ma

The biased use of pronouns serves to perpetuate the culturally based myth that men are perpetrators and women are victims. This myth is extremely damaging to the millions of male victims of sexual and physical abuse who live unacknowledged by our society.

Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36). Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermor

...[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

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?

...the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly.

Equal time is not necessary when dealing with evil. Nazis do not merit equal or fair treatment.

... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.

It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.

We are stronger than stigma, but until more celebrity role models openly discuss mental illness we will still be stereotyped as less than capable, by an upside down world that thinks reality television is actually normal behavior.

Because we often think of bias as a function of overt acts of bigotry, we can sometimes remain blind to the invisible structures, systems, and behaviors that bestow and reinforce that power and privilege on a daily basis.

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.

There was no one to blame but the mighty, ruthless stranger. Thus was complexity reduced to demonology, which is a defining feature of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, or, indeed, any "anti-ism.

The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to it animosity or two its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and it's interest.

It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.

By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been exiled from the 'pure' arena of philosophy because of its

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

Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for se

The author observers that better technology actually increased division because rival outlets funded by rival parties could get their slant to the partisans

Although the terminology implies scientific endorsement, false memory syndrome is not currently an accepted diagnostic label by the APA and is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Seventeen researchers (Carstensen et al., 1993) noted that this syndrome is a "non-psychological term originated by a private foundation whose stated purpose is to support accused parents" (p.23). Those authors urged professionals t

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

Majority is not always right. The fact that many people are in support of a wrong thing does not make the thing right. After all, the number of persons who with poor reasoning capacity is higher than those with better reasoning capacity.I don't read or care about majority's stance on a particular issue before expressing mine. I look at issues critically before expressing mine, not minding the reaction of majority.There are more foolish people than there are wise people. People who think deeply a

Majority is not always right. The fact that many people are in support of a wrong thing does not make the thing right. After all, the number of persons with poor reasoning capacity is higher than those with better reasoning capacity.I don't read or care about majority's stance on a particular issue before expressing mine. I look at issues critically before expressing mine, not minding the reaction of majority.There are more foolish people than there are wise people. People who think deeply and c

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.

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through wit

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

It is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge the true value of discoveries, or to give the proper position to the men of their own time who make these discoveries. The Surgeon-General of the Public Health Service expected the greatest results to flow from his commission of medical officers, but the conclusions of the Board turned out to be all wrong, while he did not notice the report from his own subordinate, Dr. H. R. Carter, which turned out to be pure gold and was one of the great ste

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

When dealing with critics always remember this: Critics judge things based on what is outside of their content of understanding.

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.

We may fondly imagine that we are impartial seekers after truth, but with a few exceptions, to which I know that I do not belong, we are influenced—and sometimes strongly—by our personal bias; and we give our best thoughts to those ideas which we have to defend.

Implicit [in the psychiatric literature] is a set of normative assumptions regarding the father's prerogatives and the mother's obligations within the family, The father, like the children, is presumed to be entitled to the mother's love, nurturance, and care. In fact, his dependent needs actually supersede those of the children, for if a mother falls to provide the accustomed intentions, it is taken for granted that some other female must be found to take her place. The oldest daughter is a fre

What we hear and see through the filter of bias becomes our truth, while planting the seeds of conflict.

(Everyone, I guess, sees their position as the neutral one and everyone else's position as biassed. I wonder why 177 minutes of the Today programme is completely secular; you feel horribly excluded by 3 minutes of Thought for Today. I see a sinister anti-religious bias when David Attenborough goes through a whole series without ever once aying "On the other hand maybe God made it all"; you feel that 30 minutes of hymn singing on Sunday evening amounts to theocratic oppression.)

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.

Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.

Beside him Mr. Harris folded his morning newspaper and held it out to Claude."Seen this yet?""No.""Don't read it," Mr. Harris said, folding the paper once more and sliding it under his rear. "It will only upset you, son.""It's a wicked paper... " Claude agreed, but Mr. Harris was overspeaking him."It's the big black words that do it. The little grey ones don't matter very much, they're just fill-ins they take everyday from the wires. They concentrate their poison in the big black words, where it

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren't biased as well--they certainly are--but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed--there is the 'reporting' that is essentially parroting wha

How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?

A woman of European heritage sporting a preacher's collar had the opposite effect of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab. She used her privilege and the favored religion to look like a golden child.

I'm a professional journalist. Making up lies to fit the facts - it's what we do.

Preacher pulled her gun to her lap, the trigger aimed toward the stranger. . . . He stared at her like he was ready to dial 911, until he saw she was of European heritage, saw her clerical collar, saw the Bible on the dashboard. White, blond, and Christian. Trifecta. The man's shoulders relaxed and he smiled, waved, and kept going.

Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.

Behavior makes sense from the actor's perception or else the actor wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I'm going to be conforming, mistaken, nasty, and so on.

The professor counsels against retrospective history, assuming that particular pieces contributed to an outcome.

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.

Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.

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

One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

The old bitterness came up in him and he did not have time to cogitate and push it down.

Slavery received, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary.

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

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

There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.

He did something he rarely did. He decided not to see things from the other guy's point of view.

Perhaps wherever you go first is what you judge everything else by.

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

Historical revisionists find what they set out to find.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty

Political correctness’ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.

People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

DONNA: "She said she knew it in her heart. Do you know how many times I've been wrong about things I knew in my heart?

Human beings tend to be unable to estimate how biased they are.

There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate.

Facts and values are entangled in science. It's not because scientists are biased, not because they are partial or influenced by other kinds of interests, but because of a commitment to reason, consistency, coherence, plausibility and replicability. These are value commitments.

Principles are meant to serve people, not people serving to uphold the principle, while harming the people.

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.

It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.

He knew more about the death of Lula Landry than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case, you would have been unfit to sit on a jury.

Illusion of transparency: We always know what we mean by our words, and so we expect others to know it too. Reading our own writing, the intended interpretation falls easily into place, guided by our knowledge of what we really meant. It’s hard to empathize with someone who must interpret blindly, guided only by the words.Be not too quick to blame those who misunderstand your perfectly clear sentences, spoken or written. Chances are, your words are more ambiguous than you think.

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, "had made both sides see themselves as they are.

Someone told me recently that a commentator or some sort had said, "The United States is in spiritual free-fall." When people make such remarks, such appalling judgements, they never include themselves, their friends, those with whom they agree. They have drawn, as they say, a bright line between an "us" and a "them." Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem to the "us" who presume to judge "them." This

It's not 'over-sensitivity' to ask to be treated with the same dignity and respect shown to others.

When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.

The limitation prompting folly " was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.

The world is a place of constant change. If we are open and ready to consider everything while remaining unbiased, we will be ready to accept these changes and utilize them to improve our lives.

A scientist has to be neutral in his search for the truth, but he cannot be neutral as to the use of that truth when found. If you know more than other people, you have more responsibility, rather than less.

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and

an unintentionally hilarious 84 percent of users answer this match question…Would you consider dating someone who has a vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people? In the absolute negative (choosing “No” over “Yes” and “It Depends”. In light of the previous data, that means 84 percent of people on OKCupid would not consider dating someone on OKCupid.

Every discussion which is made from an egoistic standpoint is corrupted from the start and cannot yield an absolutely sure conclusion. The ego puts its own interest first and twists every argument, word, even fact to suit that interest.

It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverers.

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

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 ov

For many, what they see on television becomes more true than what they see with their eyes in the external world. But this is not so, for one must never forget that every television and has been edited. The viewer does not see the event. He sees in edited form of the event. It is not the event which is seen, but an edited symbol or an edited image of the event. An aura and illusion of objectivity and truth is built up, which could not be totally the case, even if the people shooting the film wer

The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position but not anymore likely to change their minds based on contradictory evidence. In effect, they enlist their IQ on behalf of their instincts.

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

A mentoring nurse to new doctors: "Check your own pulse first.

What I find predictable is crazy people's ability to predict that unpredictable people can be predicted by their consistent unpredictable behavior, thus making all crazy people predictable when the world says they are unpredictable. Therefore, I must be “right” because I can predict crazy because I have been trained in the unpredictable nature of consistent craziness because I am crazy.

Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.