“Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.”
–Anonymous
A young chap once said to me, “I consider myself pretty unbiased.” My retort was swift and spiky: “So you don't take a stand on things or have meaningful opinions. Cool, cool.”
You most definitely have a bias. To declare yourself “unbiased” is to assert a litany of heinous things:
My environment and relationships have no impact on my mindset. I’m like Teflon!
Since I’m like Teflon, I can’t assemble a background of experience against which to evaluate the worth of ideas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I consider all propositions to have equal weight.
I cannot be an advocate or ally, because both require evaluating and privileging specific narratives.
I'm OK with everything! Even the Star Wars prequels.
If you ever met a truly unbiased human, you’d want to push them in a lake.
Humans are awash in bias. We are cognitively biased because human brains are made of matter and this distorts how we perceive the world. We are politically biased because we all had…
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