a hierarchy..................................

  I read about the duties of the Policy Review Board I am asked to join.  It "serves a critical function in this work.  The Board, consisting of leading citizens with many different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences, functions to guarantee the objectivity of the Public Agenda's work.  Board members review Public Agenda projects, publications, and other material to insure that they are free of ideological bias, that they are balanced and thoughtful, and that they represent the highest level of analysis and research."  Prose like that gags, doesn't it?  I mean, if leading citizens with different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences guarantee objectivity, they why isn't the United Nations objective?  And are we sure we want to be free of ideological bias?  Isn't a hierarchy of values valuable?

-William F. Buckley, Jr., Overdrive: A Personal Documentary

Thinking about..........................

...........the interplay of style and substance. 

A weapon....................................

       In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern.  One is confirmation bias:  seeing what we expect to see.  The other is desirability bias:  seeing what we want to see.  These biases don't just prevent us from applying our intelligence.  They can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth.  We find reasons to preach our faith more deeply, prosecute our case more passionately, and ride the tidal wave of our political party.  The tragedy is that we're usually unaware of the resulting flaws in our thinking.

        My favorite bias is the "I'm not biased" bias, in which people believer they're more objective that others.  It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations.  Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking.

-Adam Grant,  Think Again:  The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

On unconscious biases.....................

 My left-leaning, environmentally conscious friends are justifiably critical of ad hominem attacks on climate scientists.  You know the kind of thing:  claims that scientists are inventing data because of their political biases or because they're scrambling for funding from big government.  In short, smearing the person rather than engaging with the evidence.  Yet the same friends are happy to embrace and amplify the same kind of tactics when they're used to attack my fellow economists:  that we're inventing data because of our political biases, or scrambling for funding from big business.  I tried to point out the parallel to one thoughtful person, and got nowhere.  She was completely unable to comprehend what I was talking about.  I'd call this a 'double standard', but that would be unfair—it would suggest it was deliberate.  It's not.  It's an unconscious bias that's easy to see in others and very hard to see in ourselves.

-Tim Harford:  How to Make the World Add Up:  Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

a more fundamental challenge................

      Today, we are offered a bewildering variety of tools and concepts to aid in analysis and the construction of strategies.  Each of these tools envisions the challenge slightly differently.  For some it is identifying important trends; for others it is erecting barriers to imitation.  Yet, there is a more fundamental challenge common to all contexts.  That is the challenge of working around one's own cognitive limitations and biases—one's own myopia.  Our own myopia is the obstacle common to all strategic situations.

      Being strategic is being less myopic—less shortsighted—than others.

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

bias............................

In all of American life, there is a bias towards the happy ending, toward the notion that human resilience and intellect will be a match for any problem.  This holds especially true for problem of white supremacy.  For white people who have not quite taken on the full load of ancestral debt but can sense its weight, there is a longing for some magic that might make the burden of slavery and all that followed magically vanish.  For blacks born under the burden, there is a need to believe that a better day is on the horizon, that their lives, their children's lives, and their grandchildren's lives are not forever condemned to carry that weight, which white people can only but sense.  I felt this need whenever I spoke to audiences about my writing since, invariably, I would be asked what I could say that would give the audience hope.  I never knew how to answer the question.  The writers I loved, whom I sought to emulate, were mostly unconcerned with "hope."  But moreover—what if there was no hope at all?  Sometimes, I said as much and was often met with a kind of polite and stunned disappointment.

-Ta-Nehisi Coates,  We Were Eight Years In Power:  An American Tragedy

It is all a matter of ........................

....................................................................perspective.

On self-scrutiny...............

"The election of Donald Trump can be said to have demolished the intellectual foundation of the news business.  The pretense of objectivity had been abandoned for a higher cause.   The claim to furnish 'all the news that's fit to print' was now refuted by the failure to grasp the shape and outcome of the contest.  No one who followed the news understood the forces at play.  None guessed what was coming.  Continued consumption of the news seemed to lack any justification, other than amusement or habit.

"Dazed and demoralized, people in the media sought haphazardly to explain the disaster.  They were not good at the game:  a profession that is literally in broadcast mode shouldn't be expected to excel at self-scrutiny."

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt Of The Public

That assumes they once were..................

"But the news as an institution in a very real sense has ceased to exist.  The media elites, like elites everywhere, are driven by a fever dream of undoing the outcome of the 2016 election.  They desperately want the status quo before Trump back, and are willing to bash away, Trump-like, at their own standards and even the democratic process in pursuit of that aim.  I don't see how it's possible, from a posture of radical reaction, to reclaim the ideal of the news media as an honest broker of information."

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt Of The Public

Conflicts of interest..........................

Back in the 1960's, the scientific community was at odds about whether sugar or fat was the culprit in the increasing rates of heart disease.  In 1967, three Harvard scientists conducted a comprehensive review of the research to date, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that firmly pointed the finger at fat as the culprit.  The paper was, not surprisingly, influential in the debate on diet and heart disease.  After all, the NEJM is and was a prestigious publication and the researchers were, all three, from Harvard.  Blaming fat and exonerating sugar affected the dies of hundreds of millions of people for decades, a belief that caused a massive shift in eating habits that has been linked to the massive increase in obesity rates and diabetes.
     The influence of this paper and its negative effects on America's eating habits and health provides a stunning demonstration of the imperative of disinterestedness.  It was recently discovered that a trade group representing the sugar industry had paid the three Harvard scientists to write the paper, according to an article published in JAMA Internal Medicine in September 2016.  Not surprisingly, consistent with the agenda of the sugar industry that had paid them, the researchers attacked the methodology of studies finding a link between sugar and heart disease and defended studies finding no link.  The scientists' attacks on and defenses of the methodology of studies on fat and heart disease followed the same pro-sugar pattern.
     The scientists involved are all dead.  Were they alive, it's possible, if we could ask them, that they may not have even consciously known they were being influenced.  Given human nature, they likely, at least, would have defended the truth of what they wrote and denied that the sugar industry dictated or influenced their thinking on the subject.  Regardless, had the conflict of interest been disclosed, the scientific community would have viewed their conclusions with much more skepticism, taking into account the possibility of bias due to the researchers' financial interest.  At the time, the NEJM did not require such disclosures.  (That policy changed in 1984.)    That omission prevented an accurate assessment of their findings, resulting in serious harm to the health of the nation.

-Annie Duke, Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts