Know Your Bias

Wikipedia:

Bias is disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief. In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error. Statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average.

Your Bias Is

Today's Chart

As expected - and for the 20th year in a row - a coupla things come into pretty sharp focus.

The first is re-affirmation that the reason DumFux News and "conservatives" bitch about liberal bias is almost solely because they're way off to the right.

click to embiggen

The second item is that DumFux news has extended its losing streak to 22 years.

No Pulitzer
No Peabody
No Polk
No Hillman

Zero Zip Zilch Nada

Today's Chart

Again:

The presence of confirming evidence

and

the absence of conflicting evidence

yields a higher probability for truth

-------------

The absence of confirming evidence 

or

the presence of conflicting evidence requires continued skepticism and further review

Pick A Bias, Any Bias

The more we learn, the more we understand how little we actually know.

A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.[1] Individuals create their own "subjective social reality" from their perception of the input.[2] An individual's construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behaviour in the social world.[3] Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.[4][5][6]

Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context.[7] Furthermore, cognitive biases enable faster decisions when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics.[8] Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations,[9] resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.[10]

A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Kahneman and Tversky (1996) argue that cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas including clinical judgment.[11]

Some examples: