Biases Quotes

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor favor to those of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. An essential part of rationality is dealing with randomness in our lives and uncertainty in our knowledge.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. I had a notion that if we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what's common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“A communal outrage inspires what the psychologist Roy Maumeister calls a victim narrative: a moralized allegory in which a harmful act is sanctified, the damage consecrated as irreparable and unforgivable. The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity. Picking nits about what actually happened is seen as not just irrelevant but sacrilegious or treasonous.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“Biases continuously try to keep us from recognizing and understanding those biases. For example, racial biases keep us from understanding racial discrimination, just like religious biases keep us from understanding religious discrimination and cultural biases keep us from understanding the inhuman habits in our cultural traditions.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

“Storytelling can be the most potent way to celebrate progress, inspire change, and bring about a more diverse world. If stories shape our perceptions, then perhaps the stories we never hear shape our biases through the lack of awareness they enable.”
― Rohit Bhargava, Beyond Diversity

“Sociologist Barry Glassner (1999) has documented many of the biases introduced by “If it bleeds, it leads” news reporting, and by the strategic efforts of special interest groups to control the agenda of public fear of crime, disease, and other hazards. Is an increase of approximately 700 incidents in 50 states over 7 years an “epidemic” of road rage? Is it conceivable that there is (or ever was) a crisis in children’s day care stemming from predatory satanic cults? In 1994, a research team funded by the U.S. government spent 4 years and $750,000 to reach the conclusion that the myth of satanic conspiracies in day care centers was totally unfounded; not a single verified instance was found (Goodman, Qin, Bottoms, & Shaver, 1994; Nathan & Snedeker, 1995). Are automatic-weapon-toting high school students really the first priority in youth safety? (In 1999, approximately 2,000 school-aged children were identified as murder victims; only 26 of those died in school settings, 14 of them in one tragic incident at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.) The anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) pointed out that every culture has a store of exaggerated horrors, many of them promoted by special interest factions or to defend cultural ideologies. For example, impure water had been a hazard in 14th-century Europe, but only after Jews were accused of poisoning wells did the citizenry become preoccupied with it as a major problem.
But the original news reports are not always ill-motivated. We all tend to code and mention characteristics that are unusual (that occur infrequently). [...] The result is that the frequencies of these distinctive characteristics, among the class of people considered, tend to be overestimated.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“Space is not the final frontier, humanity is, the full manifestation of humanity, above the influence of biases, for it is much easier to conquer outer space than inner space.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“In a civilized world even bigots have a voice, but in a bigoted world, the only place where you can find reason and inclusion is prison.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“It is much easier to conquer outer space than inner space.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“Stagnated water breeds disease, when in motion it breathes life. Stagnated mind breeds segregation, when in motion it breaks divide.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“There's no humanity, there's only degrees of animality.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“The road to a civilized world goes through the dark woods of biases.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“Human brain is fundamentally racist, for every brain is born with tribalism embedded in them meant for self-preservation. It takes a lot of resolve and ceaseless, civilized self-correction to break free from that tribalism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“I have said publicly (and repeatedly) that “bias” is not an issue, that every individual has a “bias” and professors have a right to express theirs in their classrooms so long as they do so in a professional manner, and in accordance with the principles of academic freedom.What faculty may not do is to impose their bias on students through coercive grading, or by failing to provide them with critical reading materials, or by presenting their personal prejudices as established wisdom.”
― David Horowitz, Indoctrination U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom

“Biases are nature's algorithm for the preservation of life, but unlike mechanical algorithms, nature's algorithm in human neuroanatomy is accompanied by the capacity to defy that predominant algorithm and write new ones with acts of self-regulation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

“A person's assumptions reveal who they are, more than the words they utter.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Engaging in the physical world; learning how to build or make or do something in the physical world, where the results aren't negotiable; you can't claim that you did it if you didn't; you either summited, or the cake is edible, or the eggplant grew, or the table is made - whatever it is, doing something that is a physical manifestation in the world will create strength and ability. [And that physical experience is important because unless you have experience you may have inaccurate ideas about things.]

Experience reveals your biases. And it reveals the holes in your thinking. And it informs you and enables you to become a much more complete and frankly, compassionate human being.”
― Heather E. Heying

“We can never be too cautious of our biases!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction

“When walking into a system that is new to us, it can be more effective to be naïve to what others have thought, at least at first. If you are already certain of what the solution set of probabilities looks like, you lose some of what it is to be human... You lose access to truth, because the only way you will see what is true is if it is already a match for what you thought beforehand. This is a path that therefore cannot grow your understanding.”
― Heather E. Heying

“Handcrafted Humanity Sonnet 81

If a tradition endorses hate and mistrust,
It’s the tradition that we must reject not people.
If a heritage endorses division and discrimination,
It's the heritage that we must reject not people.
If an ancestor passes on bigotry and barbarism,
It’s the ancestor that we must reject not people.
If a bible teaches phobia and separatism,
It’s the bible that we must reject not people.
If a messiah preaches blindness and conspiracy,
It's the messiah that we must reject not people.
If God commands oppression and occupation,
It’s the God that we must reject not people.
Above all commandment, love is the highest truth.
Anything that divides love is a stoneage residue.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“My call to action goes well beyond asking you to pressure your recruiting team to hire a couple of token employees. That's easy and you've been doing that for years.

My call to action is that you dig deeper and place focus on making the work environment sustainable for the minorities you introduce to your team. I'm challenging you to refrain from the habitual practice of listening only to the jaded opinions of people that you are more familiar with.

Consider that, although you may be under the impression that your employees have strong ethics, morals and values, there is a possibility that they mat not be telling you the entire truth when speaking about the performance or demeanor of minorities.

Furthermore, I challenge you to accept that racism, ageism, ableism, classism, sizeism, homophobia, etc., are real and shaping the semblance of your organization.

Accepting that fact does not mean that people you work with and trust are bad people. It simply means that many of them are naïve, fearful, and more comfortable with pointing fingers at the innocent than they are with facing and addressing their own unconscious and damaging biases.”
― Talisa Lavarry, Confessions From Your Token Black Colleague: True Stories & Candid Conversations About Equity & Inclusion In The Workplace

“Perhaps the fundamental precept of probabilistic analysis is the exhortation to take a bird’s-eye, distributional view of the situation under analysis (e.g., a dice game, the traffic in Boulder, crimes in Pittsburgh, the situation with that troublesome knee) and to define a sample space of all the possible events and their logical, set membership interrelations. This step is exactly where rational analysis and judgments based on availability, similarity, and scenario construction diverge: When we judge intuitively, the mind is drawn to a limited, systematically skewed subset of the possible events. In the case of scenario construction, for example, we are often caught in our detailed scenario—focused on just one preposterously specific outcome path.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“The term “political overconfidence” should be at the front of our awareness in political discussions, and the political overconfidence we should each be most aware of and most eager to expose is, of course, our own.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The divisions, the biases, the differences
Oh Lord! There is no end at all!
Human beings are all but one
Why do we create so many fences and walls?”
― Neelam Saxena Chandra, misty moments

“Don’t throw the person out with the opinion.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Humanizing AI (The Sonnet)

You can code tasks,
But not consciousness.
You can code phony feelings,
But definitely not sentience.
Nobody can bring a machine to life,
No matter how complex you make it.
But once a machine is complex enough,
It might develop awareness by accident.
So let us focus on humanizing AI,
By removing biases from algorithms,
Rather than dehumanizing AI,
By aiming for a future without humans.
Rich kids with rich dreams make good movies.
Be human first and use AI to equalize communities.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“Just as how unconscious bias can seep into algorithms, so can conscious bias. Conscious bias happens when we know we’re being biased toward a particular person or a group of people. Although this is rare in AI, the threat is always there.”
― Kavita Ganesan, The Business Case for AI: A Leader's Guide to AI Strategies, Best Practices & Real-World Applications

“Of all forms of commentary on the divine Word, a translation is the most subtle.”
― Anthony Buzzard, Our Fathers Who Aren't in Heaven

“The Empowered Sonnet

Woman empowered is civilization empowered.
Dream empowered is progress empowered.
Parents empowered is children empowered.
Teachers empowered is future empowered.
Don't defund the police, use those funds,
To send the officers to behavioral therapy.
To have an understanding of justice and order,
We must have a grip over our impulses and biases.
Discrimination don't disappear if we shut our eyes,
Each of us must live as an antidote to discrimination.
Ignorance doesn't become knowledge when peddled by scripture,
Better burn all scriptures if they peddle hate and division.
To conquer our biases and stereotypes is to conquer inhumanity.
To expand our heart beyond assumption is to empower humanity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, High Voltage Habib: Gospel of Undoctrination