484 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2019
    1. Likewise, merely telling students that motivated reasoning has an impact on their information processing is apt to yield mixed results because students who view themselves as intelligent, fair-minded people will likely meet this revelation with a level of disconfirmation bias.

      Students and faculty both. Many disciplines are reluctant to introduce critical perspectives on disciplinary publishing too early, feeling that students need grounding in accepted information flows before branching out into active debates.

    1. Of course men haven't been discriminated against as much a women in the work place. Men are "meant" to do jobs in STEM, while women aren't really seen in the STEM program as much. Women deserve to be recognized in anything as much as men are they're just as good.

    1. he would extend this to "science" tout court-does not use value-free lan-guage, that value-free language does not exist, and that we cannot posit a purely transparent language devoid of distracting ornament, through which we transact business with pure facts.

      This reminds me of an article I read in my Feminist Epistemologies class, "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles," which shook me to my core. It argues that science and culture are intertwined and that they influence and reinforce one another. The scientific descriptions of egg, sperm, reproduction, and ovulation she provides to support her argument show how dangerous the perpetuation of the idea of "value-free" and/or unbiased language can be (and is).

    1. if packages and their elements are essential tools, then it makes a considerable difference that some are more readily available than others. Making sense of the world requires an effort, and those tools that are developed, spotlighted, and made readily accessible have a higher probability of being used

      i.e. the most available and accessible frames are the most likely to influence public opinion

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  2. Nov 2018
    1. how does misrepresentative information make it to the top of the search result pile—and what is missing in the current culture of software design and programming that got us here?

      Two core questions in one? As to "how" bad info bubbles to the top of our search results, we know that the algorithms are proprietary—but the humans who design them bring their biases. As to "what is missing," Safiya Noble suggests here and elsewhere that the engineers in Silicon Valley could use a good dose of the humanities and social sciences in their decision-making. Is she right?

    1. Humans participate in social learning for a variety of adaptive reasons, such as reducing uncertainty (Kameda and Nakanishi, 2002), learning complex skills and knowledge that could not have been invented by a single individual alone (Richerson and Boyd, 2000; Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner, 1993), and passing on beneficial cultural traits to offspring (Palmer, 2010). One proposed social-learning mechanism is prestige bias (Henrich and Gil-White, 2001), defined as the selective copying of certain “prestigious” individuals to whom others freely show deference or respect in orderto increase the amount and accuracy of information available to the learner.Prestige bias allows a learner in a novel environment to quickly and inexpensively choose from whom to learn, thus maximizing his or her chances of acquiring adaptive behavioral so lutions toa specific task or enterprisewit hout having to assess directly the adaptiveness of every potential model’s behavior.Learners provide deference to teachers in order to ingratiate themselves with a chosen model, thus gaining extended exposure to that model(Henrich and Gil-White, 2001).New learners can then use that information—who is paying attention to whom—to increase their likelihood of choosing a good teacher.

      Throughout this article are several highlighted passages that combine to form this annotation.

      This research study presents the idea that the social environment is a self-selected learning environment for adults. The idea of social prestige-bias learning is intriguing because it is derived from the student, not an institution nor instructor. The further idea of selecting whom to learn from based on prestige-bias also creates further questions that warrant a deeper understanding of the learner and the environment which s/he creates to gain knowledge.

      Using a previously conducted experiment on success-based learning and learning due to environmental change, this research further included the ideal of social prestige-biased learning.self-selected by the learner.

      In a study of 167 participants, three hypotheses were tested to see if learners would select individual learning, social learning, prestige-biased learning (also a social setting), or success-based learning. The experiment tested both an initial learning environment and a learning environment which experienced a change in the environment.

      Surprisingly, some participants selected social prestige-biased learning and some success learning and the percentages in each category did not change after the environmental change occurred.

      Questions that arise from the study:

      • Does social prestige, or someone who is deemed prestigious, equate to a knowledgeable teacher?
      • Does the social prestige-biased environment reflect wise choices?
      • If the student does not know what s/he does not know, will the social prestige-bias result in selecting the better teacher, or just in selecting a more highly recognized teacher?
      • Why did the environmental change have little impact on the selected learning environment?

      REFERENCE: Atkinson, C., O’Brien, M.J., & Mesoudi, A. (2012). Adult learners in a novel environment use prestige-biased social learning. Evolutionary Psychology, 10(3), 519-537. Retrieved from (Prestige-biased Learning )

      RATINGS content, 9/10 veracity, 8/10 easiness of use, 9/10 Overall Rating, 8.67/10

  3. Oct 2018
  4. www.projectinfolit.org www.projectinfolit.org
    1. telephone interviews with 37 participants

      I have to wonder at telephone samples of this age group given the propensity of youth to not communicate via voice phone.

  5. Sep 2018
    1. build regular feedback loops

      Once you realize that you have a bias, you can try one of the suggested methods to counteract it. In this case, to get a realistic view of our progress towards goals, the suggestion is to build feedback loops into our routine.

  6. Aug 2018
    1. Using Twitter to detect rumoring activity allows us to measure rumoring at large spatial and temporal scales, but it placeslimits on the generalizability of our results. Activity on Twitter does not represent all rumoring activity or all online, informalcommunication. Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project provides an in-depth examination of how Twitter’sdemographics compare to those of the United States (Duggan and Brenner, 2013). Twitter demographics skew (indepen-dently) young, urban, and minority, while there is no significant difference in participation across gender, educationalattainment, and income. These results may overrepresent rumoring activity from minority, urban, or young populations. It isnot immediately clear, however, how this would bias the results, as the existing literature does not clearly demonstrate thatthese particular groups engage in rumoring activity that differs in volume, content, or form from other populations. None-theless, it is worthwhile to recognize the biased population from which these data are drawn, as a number of electronicallymediated communication media will have similar biases that must be recognized when applyingfiltering techniques.

      Potential bias of younger, more urban Twitter users vs USA population

  7. Jul 2018
    1. Scholars have known for decades that people tend to search for and believe information that confirms what they already think is true. The new elements are social media and the global networks of friends who use it. People let their guard down on online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where friends, family members, and coworkers share photos, gossip, and a wide variety of other information. That’s one reason why people may fall for false news, as S. Shyam Sundar, a Pennsylvania State University communication professor, explains in The Conversation. Another reason: People are less skeptical of information they encounter on platforms they have personalized — through friend requests and “liked” pages, for instance — to reflect their interests and identity.
    1. I think this paper and these data could be extremely useful for psychologists, but I also think this paper needs at least one more analysis: estimating effect sizes by research area, controlling for publication bias.

      It's very hard to interpret these estimates given good evidence and arguments that researchers and journals select for p < .05. I think it's safe to assume that all these estimates reported in this preprint are bigger than the true averages (Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014).

      One approach to estimating "selection bias adjusted" effects would be to estimate the effect size for each research area using the code provided in the p-curve effect size paper supplements (http://www.p-curve.com/Supplement/). You could estimate confidence intervals or percentiles using bootstrapping procedures or write code to estimate the lower and upper bounds using the same methods to estimate the average effect.

      This approach assumes the p-values all test the hypothesis of interest and don't suffer from unique selection biases (see Selecting p Values in Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014, p. 540).

      Hope this helps make the paper better!

  8. Feb 2018
    1. strategy to diminish gender bias in the peer review process. Suggesting female and young scientist when a male reviewer declines invitation to review.

  9. Jan 2018
  10. Nov 2017
    1. To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business. To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express & preserve his ideas, his contracts & accounts in writing. To improve by reading, his morals and faculties. To understand his duties to his neighbours, & country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either. To know his rights; to exercise with order & justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciaries of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence with candor & judgment. And, in general, to observe with intelligence & faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

      I found these specific objects of primary education to be quite important to the standing and image the school wanted and still wants to portray. It addresses the purpose of the University to create better more intelligent citizens for Virginia and the country. However, to me it seemed somewhat ironic due to the University’s background. It reveals earlier in the article that University's location was chosen based on its centrality to the white population in Virginia. This statement clearly implies a bias against non-white Virginians, even though the listed purposes of the University and what it hopes to impart to its students in this report depicts a different message. It paints a picture of in which the students utilize their higher level education to behave morally, accepting, self-aware, and faithful to social relations and knowledge. Does this mean these standard morals don’t apply to non-white Virginians? The irony highlights how the purposes of the University can be interpreted in different ways, either as a way to serve the white people in order to “preserve [their] ideas” of bias and superiority. Oppositely, the students could use their newfound knowledge to “improve [their] morals” and work to bring about change in society by education others ethics and equality.

    1. Education generates habits of application, order and the love of virtue; and controuls, by the force of habit, any innate obliquities in our moral organization.

      This is a very powerful statement regarding the purpose of higher education. The commissioners of the university clearly had a vision for how the education that the university provided should affect its students. However, the statement is somewhat idealistic in that it includes the idea that education will drive out any "innate" or subconscious deviations from morality. We all know that this was certainly not achieved at the time of the university's founding, when the practice of owning slaves was perceived as moral, and also has not been achieved today, although UVA has introduced many new efforts to combat this problem. Through the university's response to the Unite the Right rally this summer, the numerous implicit bias modules and presentations it offers, and the engagements themselves, our "innate obliquities" are being discussed and brought to light so that we as a university can take deliberate steps towards achieving this ideal view of education put forth by the commissioners of UVA. Claire Waterhouse

    1. having students do a basic Google image search for terms like “doctor” “teacher” “baby”

      It may sound obvious but it actually works. Just did it with each of these three words (on DuckDuckGo) and the results, though unsurprising, bring home the point. Tried switching on the Canadian filter, to check if their might be a difference, and it mostly reorders the results, for some reason. Also tried “student” and “musician” which provide an interesting contrast. Doing this exercise in class, would probably start by asking learners to write down what they expect to get. (Might even do it in my applied anthro class, tomorrow.)

    2. In this particular case, Google worked as a kind of amplifier of distortion.
  11. Oct 2017
    1. In fact, members of the Long Now would have me say that it was founded in the year 01996, a way of writing dates that presently accommodates a further 97,985 years. To put this into perspective—50,000 years before the Long Now runs out of digits, Niagara Falls will have eroded its remaining 32 kilometers to Lake Erie. That communion will occur a full 30,000 years after, according to one lexico-statistical model, the point at which human languages will have retained only one percent of their present-day words. By the time the Long Now has a Y100k problem, the constellations you recognize will be gone from the sky. I lay this out to make the point that Long Now folks embed a puckishly provocative optimism in everything they do.

      Is it just me, or am I detecting an underlying disdain from the author towards The Long Now Foundation? If so, I would not blame her as the beliefs The Long Now hold appear surreal and unbelievable to me. I was unaware that their was a group that held such views.

    1. healthiness & fertility. It was the degree of centrality to the white population of the state which alone then constituted

      According to this line, the only important characteristics of a piece of land are "healthiness & fertility" and "degree of centrality to the white population." This portion of the text provides important insight into the ethical lens of Jefferson and his peers: something is only worth consideration if it bolsters health, agriculture or white males. The authors presented their guidelines for land consideration as clear-cut, failing to mention the fact that Jefferson was especially inclined towards Charlottesville because of its proximity to Monticello. While the text operates under the assumption that health, fertility, and convenience for white people were the only important considerations (which is a skewed set of principles in the first place), Jefferson's personal bias was a major, albeit hidden, factor as well.

    2. Education, in like manner engrafts a new man on the native stock, & improves what in his nature was vicious & perverse, into qualities of virtue and social worth

      This passage clearly exhibits the desire of human growth and expansion generated by the University. Again, there is this ambition to continue to be better than before; adding to the prestige of the University of Virginia. This quote discusses “qualities of virtue and social worth,” however, they do not outline their virtues and social worths - it is to be implied by the times of it’s creation. From my Doing Fieldwork Engagement, I have learned that social virtues and worths are extremely varied depending on the perspective. It is not fair to assume that everyone follows and conforms to one’s own expectations and values; in fact, this makes one ignorant and biased when collecting viable and strong data.

    1. Addressing implicit and explicit cultural biases in data is going to be a huge challenge for everyone who is trying to build a system dependent on data classified by or about humans.

      bias in data

  12. Jun 2017
  13. Apr 2017
  14. Mar 2017
    1. It is crucial to address bias in predictive models, ensure the statistical significance of predictions beyond race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, and forbid the use of algorithms that produce discriminatory results.

      We should not look at predictors that will not help us to make accurate interventions. Statistics should not be used to support bias.

    1. “When we are trying to understand and explain what happens in social settings, we tend to view behavior as a particularly significant factor. We then tend to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition, such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc. as opposed to external situational factors. This can be due to our focus on the person more than their situation, about which we may know very little. We also know little about how they are interpreting the situation.
    1. they’d identified websites online that “proved” their beliefs.

      For anyone interested a good discussion of Confirmation Bias can be found in this (somewhat old) article

  15. Feb 2017
    1. Right, well of course people don’t look up product information now because the government regulates that for them. In a real libertarian society, they would be more proactive.

      Most people don't care, or trust the big companies. I do that. I also think that the existence of some government regulation incentive companies to not sell poisoned food.

      On the other hand, there is certification, independent certification, and these are being used today and trusted by people today. It's reasonable to supposed independent certification would be much much greater in a libertarian world.

      Of course certification would not cover every field, every product and every possible problem, but neither does the State.

    2. For a boss to fire a worker is at most a minor inconvenience; for a worker to lose a job is a disaster. The Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, a measure of the comparative stress level of different life events, puts being fired at 47 units, worse than the death of a close friend and nearly as bad as a jail term. Tellingly, “firing one of your employees” failed to make the scale.

      Because of State labor laws, stupid. They make it hard to change jobs, hard to fire workers and hence hard to hire workers. In a libertarian world this would in principle be much smoother.

    3. Once the employee is hired, the boss may ask on a moment’s notice that she work a half hour longer or else she’s fired, and she may not dare to even complain. On the other hand, if she were to so much as ask to be allowed to start work thirty minutes later to get more sleep or else she’ll quit, she might well be laughed out of the company. A boss may, and very often does, yell at an employee who has made a minor mistake, telling her how stupid and worthless she is, but rarely could an employee get away with even politely mentioning the mistake of a boss, even if it is many times as unforgivable.

      Here and after the author treats as a libertarian problem what happens today under the rule of the State labor laws.

      In a world without State labor laws, contracts would apply. Contracts could evolve and have all these situations expected in their clauses. Also, this seems to me to be a case for actually working law (which the criticism imagines as unexisting in a libertarian society): https://hypothes.is/a/PBirDvnYEeaWvjeIs4H9kg.

    1. So how many individuals from each nation have been involved in terror attacks in Europe since 9/11? 

      The following text shows that people from the seven countries picked both by the U.S. Congress,Obama, and Trump do pose a significant risk of terrorism, despite the mainstream media's statements to the contrary.

      Trump's temporary immigration ban from these seven countries was far from optimal, and may have actually caused considerably more harm than good, but it was not nearly as absurd at the mainstream media is propagandizing people to believe.

    1. Why you should send your daughter to an all-girls school

      The author info "Loren Bridge is the executive officer of the Alliance of Girls' Schools Australasia." should be at the top of the article, to highlight the bias involved.

  16. Jan 2017
    1. Belinda Cleary For Daily Mail Australia

      Who is this author? Does she have an area of expertise that's related to this story? How would you find out? What is this source and what are its biases? How would you find out?

  17. Dec 2016
    1. Albert Einstein was one of the most important physicists of all time. His scientific predictions have withstood 100 years of scientific challenges. His thinking fundamentally changed the way we understand the universe. Yet people are more likely to be convinced Einstein wasn’t a great physicist than to change their minds on topics like immigration or the death penalty.

      It has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence (or the quality of information on Einstein or immigration policy). It’s due to the fact that we’re simply more open to changing our minds on nonpolitical topics. Scientists have been keen to figure out why — because if they can, it may open the door to the hardest challenge in politics right now: changing minds.

      Psychologists have been circling around a possible reason political beliefs are so stubborn: Partisan identities get tied up in our personal identities. Which would mean that an attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on the self. And the brain is built to protect the self.

      When we’re attacked, we evade or defend — as if we have an immune system for uncomfortable thoughts, one you can see working in real time.

  18. Sep 2016
    1. Inside Bad Boy Family Reunion, 2016's Most Hit-Packed Tour

      This reminds me of how corrupted media is now. If this is how we get entertainment it doesn't make much sense. Almost every story on this site is filled with bias.

    1. At a time when many multiracial Americans are proudly asserting their mixed-race identity, many Latinos, an overwhelmingly blended population with Indian, European, African and other roots, are sidestepping or ignoring questions of race.

      Since people keep assuming and getting things wrong, some latinos try to ignore the question of race in order to stop the disagreements.

    2. When respondents do not choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on factors like the racial makeup of their neighborhood, inevitably leading to a less accurate count.

      This is incredibly stupid. I think this would lead to many riots and fights because people are being judged and Census is using cultural bias to put people in a box. Not only is this not accurate this is also racist.

  19. Aug 2016
    1. It’s another example of “male as default”—the idea that men are a ”neutral” category, with women in a separate, non-default, and markedly different one.
    2. One major example of gender differences in VR is that women are far more susceptible to VR-induced nausea.
  20. Jul 2016
  21. Jun 2016
    1. Title: Is Polite Philosophical Discussion Possible? (guest post by Nomy Arpaly) - Daily Nous

      Keywords: implicit bias, philosophical discussion, war crimes, moral inhibitions—

      Summary: For brevity’s sake, let’s just say it’s a big part of politeness or civility not to correct people.<br>A soldier who is fighting, even for a just cause, is in a precarious situation, with regard to morality, because he has lost, of necessity, the basic moral inhibition against killing people.<br>A philosopher who is arguing with another, even in pursuit of truth, is in a precarious situation with regard to politeness, because she has lost, of necessity, the basic civil inhibition against correcting people.<br>Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against killing people, some soldiers find themselves shedding other moral inhibitions—and committing war crimes.<br>Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against correcting people, some philosophers find themselves shedding other social inhibitions—and being terribly, terribly rude.<br>That’s just the nature of inhibition loss.<br>You need the real thing.<br>Being compelled to break the rule of thumb against telling people that they are mistaken in the understanding of an important thing is no excuse for also yelling at them, repeatedly interrupting them and talking over them, responding to their painstakingly prepared talks with a sneering “why should I be interested in any of this”?<br>Furthermore, I will argue against the philosophical Henry Kissinger within many of us who worries that whatever might be true about war and war crimes, realistically speaking philosophical rigor just requires rudeness.<br>It’s clearly a vice, virtue ethicists would say.<br>I would like to add the following.<br>First, if everyone is rude, women are judged unfairly (as potential colleagues, for example) because rude women are treated more harshly than rude men, by everyone, due to implicit bias.<br>Again, changing behavior is much easier than changing implicit bias.<br>Some think philosophy should change here—either through what I called “pacifism” earlier or through changing the way we evaluate people, or otherwise.<br>It won’t solve everything, but if we reduce rudeness, I solemnly promise that more women will want to do philosophy.<br>It is shown most emphatically by downright quiet, mild-mannered philosophers whose objections, expressed in a nice tone of voice, are nonetheless absolutely lethal.<br>They say revenge is best served cold.<br>Philosophical discussion can legitimately feel like a very tiring game of squash.<br>(Vincent Van Gogh, detail of “Four Cut Sunflowers”)<br>

    1. No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission

      Fish, Stanley. 1988. “Guest Column: No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission.” PMLA 103 (5): 739–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/462513.

      An interesting essay in the context I'm reading it (alongside Foucault's What is an author in preparation for a discussion of scientific authorship.

      Among the interesting things about it are the way it encapsulates a distinction between the humanities and sciences in method (though Fish doesn't see it and it comes back to bite him in the Sokol affair). What Frye thinks is important because he is an author-function in Foucault's terms, I.e. a discourse initiator to whom we return for new insight.

      Fish cites Peters and Ceci 1982 on peer review, and sides with those who argue that ethos should count in review of science as well.

      Also interesting for an illustration of how much the field changed, from new criticism in the 1970s (when the first draft was written) until "now" i.e. 1989 when political criticism is the norm.

    1. the possibility of my getting from there to here

      Ah-- now we are getting to a real goal. I do like that Nikole Hannah-Jones is making clear her personal frame for these issues. What's mine? I grew up in a town in Pennsylvania, where "the racial makeup of the borough was 97.32% White..." and the one high school in the town reflected this homogeneity. As a teacher (except for a couple of years in Salt Lake City), I have always taught in segregated African-American and Latino public schools in New York City -- except, I need to remember, for three years of teaching at the East-West School for International Studies in Flushing, where the diversity of students was something special. And there was a lot of diversity at the International School at LaGuardia where I also taught for a few years. SO... There are exceptions, and I suppose these exceptions are important to think about as I consider my own frames and biases on these issues.

  22. Mar 2016
    1. Begg, C. B., & Berlin, J. A. (1988). Publication bias: A problem in interpreting medical data.Journal of theRoyal Statistical Society A, 151, 419–463.
    2. Gerber, A. S., & Malhotra, N. (2008). Publication bias in empirical sociological research: Do arbitrarysignificance levels distort published results?Sociological Methods & Research, 37, 3–30
    3. Gilbody, S. M., Song, F., Eastwood, A. J., & Sutton, A. (2000). The causes, consequences and detection ofpublication bias in psychiatry.Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 102, 241–249
    4. Kennedy, D. (2004). The old file-drawer problem.Science, 305, 45
    5. Koletsi, D., Karagianni, A., Pandis, N., Makou, M., Polychronopolou, A., & Eliades, T. (2009). Are studiesreporting significant results more likely to be published?American Journal of Orthodontics andDentofacial Orthopedics, 136, 632e1

      positive

    6. Krzyzanowska, M. K., Pintilie, M., & Tannock, I. F. (2003). Factors associated with failure to publish largerandomized trials presented at an oncology meeting.Journal of the American Medical Association,290, 495–501
    7. Levine, T., Asada, K. J., & Carpenter, C. (2009). Sample sizes and effect sizes are negatively correlated inmeta-analyses: Evidence and implications of a publication bias against non-significant findings.Communication Monographs, 76, 286–302
    8. Paris, G., De Leo, G., Menozzi, P., & Gatto, M. (1998). Region-based citation bias in science.Nature, 396,6708
    9. Rosenthal, R. (1979). The file drawer problem and tolerance for null results.Psychological Bulletin, 86,638–641

      p

    10. Song, F. J., Parekh-Bhurke, S., Hooper, L., Loke, Y. K., Ryder, J. J., Sutton, A. J., et al. (2009). Extent ofpublication bias in different categories of research cohorts: A meta-analysis of empirical studies.BMCMedical Research Methodology, 9, 79
    11. Sterling, T. D. (1959). Publication decisions and their possible effects on inferences drawn from tests ofsignificance—Or vice versa.Journal of the American Statistical Association, 54, 30–34

      publication bias

    1. Pautasso, M. (2010). Worsening file-drawer problem in the abstracts of natural, medical and social sciencedatabases.Scientometrics, 85(1), 193–202
    2. Shelton, R. D., Foland, P., & Gorelskyy, R. (2009). Do new SCI journals have a different national bias?Scientometrics, 79(2), 351–363. doi:
    3. Silvertown, J., & McConway, K. J. (1997). Does ‘‘publication bias’’ lead to biased science?Oikos, 79(1),167–168.
    4. Yousefi-Nooraie, R., Shakiba, B., & Mortaz-Hejri, S. (2006). Country development and manuscript selec-tion bias: A review of published studies.BMC Medical Research Methodology, 6, 37

      On developing countries and science

    5. Jeng, M. (2006). A selected history of expectation bias in physics.American Journal of Physics, 74(7),578–583

      History of expectation bias in physics

    6. Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2008a). Perfect study, poor evidence: Interpretation of biases preceding study design.Seminars in Hematology, 45(3), 160–166

      effect of positive bias

    7. Feigenbaum, S., & Levy, D. M. (1996). Research bias: Some preliminary findings.Knowledge and Policy:The International Journal of Knowledge Transfer and Utilization, 9(2 & 3), 135–142.

      Positive bias

    8. Song, F., Parekh, S., Hooper, L., Loke, Y. K., Ryder, J., Sutton, A. J., et al. (2010). Dissemination andpublication of research findings: An updated review of related biases.Health Technology Assessment,14(8), 1–193. doi

      positive bias

    1. But there’s, I think there is a question of how you interpret the data, even ... ifthe experiments are very well designed. And, in terms of advice—not that I’mgoing to say that it’s shocking—but one of my mentors, whom I very muchrespect as a scientist—I think he’s extraordinarily good—advised me to alwaysput the most positive spin you can on your data. And if you try to present, like,present your data objectively, like in a job seminar, you’re guaranteed tonotgetthe job

      Importance of "spinning" data

    2. You are. And you know what the problems are in doing the experiments. And ifyou, in your mind, think that there should be one more control—because youknow this stuff better than anybody else because you’re doing it, you know—you decided not to do that, not to bring up what the potential difficulties are, youhave a better chance of getting that paper published. But it’s—I don’t think it’sthe right thing to do.

      deliberate positive bias

  23. Feb 2016
    1. Media Bias?

      Image Description

      Check out this sketch from Saturday Night Live that mocks the news media for being uncritically in love with then candidate Barack Obama. There first and second questions for him are whether he is completely comfortable or if they can get anything for him.

  24. Jan 2016
    1. While The Winnower won’t eliminate bias (we are humans, after all) the content of the reviews can be evaluated by all because they will be readily accessible. [Note: reviewers could list competing interests in the template suggested on The Winnower’s blog.]
  25. Jun 2015
    1. But these studies on the halo effect of attractiveness, should make us suspicious that there may be a similar halo effect for kindness, or intelligence.

      You can identify your halos and pitchforks. These are the attributes that cause you to be most easily and unconsciously drawn into the halo effect and they are known as implicit biases.

    1. I don't claim to understand the thought processes that would drive someone to do this, but given the rarity and extremity of suicide, we can assume for every worker who goes ahead with suicide for work-related reasons, there are a hundred or a thousand who feel miserable but not quite suicidal.
  26. May 2015
    1. That is, the human annotators are likely to assign different relevance labels to a document, depending on the quality of the last document they had judged for the same query. In addi- tion to manually assigned labels, we further show that the implicit relevance labels inferred from click logs can also be affected by an- choring bias. Our experiments over the query logs of a commercial search engine suggested that searchers’ interaction with a document can be highly affected by the documents visited immediately be- forehand.
    1. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for.

      That is rather outrageous that we've known about this since 1959 and have done nothing about it.

  27. Feb 2015
    1. I am a PhD candidate in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group of Computer Science Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I work in the CASCAD Lab, advised by Prof.Wai-Tat Fu. I also work closely with Prof. Bruce Schatz . My research interests broadly lie in the fields of human computer interaction (HCI), social computing, health informatics and cognitive science. Please see bio and projects for more details.
  28. Oct 2014
    1. A few different people said that when a tip is low, they assume the customer is cheap or hurting for money, but when it’s high, they assume it’s because they did a great job serving the customer or because they’re likable (not that the customer is generous).
  29. Feb 2014
    1. Then the other answered

      1.27. Bias/Pittacus responds by pointing out the ridiculousness of Croesus' plan to attack the islanders on their own terms.

    2. Croesus, thinking that he spoke the truth, said: “Would that the gods would put this in the heads of the islanders, to come on horseback against the sons of the Lydians!”

      1.27. Croesus replies to Bias/Pittacus, suggesting that the islanders would be at a disadvantage if they were to attack the Lydians, renowned for their cavalry, on horseback.

    3. asked by Croesus for news about Hellas, put an end to the shipbuilding by giving the following answer

      1.27. Croesus asks for news; Bias/Pittacus responds with an ironic statement.

    4. either Bias of Priene or Pittacus of Mytilene (the story is told of both) came to Sardis

      1.27. In what is presumably an apocryphal story, one of the Seven Sages of Greek tradition visits Croesus (the fact that the story is told with both Bias and Pittacus makes it even more likely to be apocryphal).

    5. so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory

      Hdt. 1.1 motive; bias? H's idea of glory and great deeds? "not be forgotten in time" -- I agree this is important.

  30. Sep 2013
    1. Those states in which an occasional citizen is put to death without a trial we condemn as unfit to live in, yet are blind to the fact that we are in the same case when we do not hear with equal good will both sides of the contest.

      He cries hypocrisy here, a strong rhetorical device. Although I'm not sure whether this would make the jury rethink their impressions or make them more biased against him.

    2. a true image of my thought and of my whole life; for I hoped that this would serve both as the best means of making known the truth about me and, at the same time, as a monument, after my death, more noble than statues of bronze

      Can we trust a "true image" of Isocrates if it is written by himself? Especially if his goal is to be remembered as noble and great?