Archive | October, 2012

Why do I care about bias and objectivity

12 Oct

The reason of course stems from my from my life and experience. More than that its my striving for the good life. Not so much in terms of wealth, but in the elusive quality of a life lived in a way I think is good. Enough of that for now.

In my experience, most of the times that I loose objectivity, something suffers in a way that it doesn’t have to. Unfairness finds space in my life when I’m not objective. Now it is a matter of degree, but I do find that to be the case.

I also find that I loose objectivity increasing with the degree of emotional involvement in the issue. The general rule being the greater the emotions, the greater the lose if objectivity.

Finally, when I act on this non-objective thinking that is emotion based, thing tend to get screwed up.

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Objectivity and bias

12 Oct

OK. So my buddy Tony and I have discussed very often the notion of objectivity and the notion of bias. There is a very different view in our respective domains (natural science (n.sci) , social science (s.sci) ) around the reasonableness of objectivity. The left wing (of which I am part) of social science contends that there is nothing true about the notion of objectivity. I think the term that Tony uses that he prefers that describes what is achievable is “disciplined bios”.

Nat Scientists on the other hand think that there is something that we can call “objectivity”. I think that if we come down to it, we both think that the process is asymptotic…we can always approach closer, but we can never get there. In other words, slight improvements are always possible, but perfection isn’t. I think that we can both agree that objectivity isn’t binary, either you are or you aren’t. Its not like that. Its continuous with the objectivity gradient getting more and more purely objective or biased.

What I have never clearly understood is the keeping of two notions in the mind at the same time. No S.Sci person would contend that bias doesn’t exist. It is more achievable than objectivity. They also know they don’t like it (neither do we n.sci folks). They also agree that bias can be diminished.

So I say imagine two columns where one one goes up, the other goes down. I contend it works like that. I would say the NO ONE can say that the two are NOT mutually exclusive and inversely proportional. If you agree that bias can be diminished, then you have to agree that objectivity is increased. Logically, one would have to also agree that in theory, if you can diminish bias a lot, you increase objectivity alot.

I would contend that if you diminish bias a great deal, to the full extent that you can in practice, you’ve achieved a state of reasonable “objectivity”. I see that objectivity (or minimized bias) is the state that we want to attain. Bias is the state we want to avoid.

I’m going to hang out with Tony and Papo so I think that we can talk about this a bunch.

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