Bias entails a value-directed departure from accuracy, objectivity, and balance--not just a distorted presentation of facts. If, f...or example, a reporter fails to notice that the computer has swallowed a crucial paragraph in a news story, and the story is published without the paragraph, the inevitable distortion results from error, not bias. For a story to be biased, the distorted information it contains must be causally connected to the writer's or editor's values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What's past and what's to come is strewed with husks And formless ruin of oblivion;... But in this extant moment, faith and truth, Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing, Bids thee, with most divine integrity, From heart of very heart, great Hector, welcome!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth, And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,... With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bias, point of view, fury--are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours ...leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. ...Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a s...keptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a ...conquistador--an adventurer, if you want it translated--with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A well-proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner ...to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers ind...ependently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is cancelled out when the large picture is put together. This might conceivably be so if scientists were women and men from all sorts of different cultural and social backgrounds who came to science with very different ideologies and interests. But since, in fact, they have been predominantly university-trained white males from privileged social backgrounds, the bias has been narrow and the product often reveals more about the investigator than about the subject being researched.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »