Centerfield

Sick of talking about bias yet?

"Twas Instapundit that turned me onto the non-RedSoxian Derek Lowe's smackdown of a NYTimes editorial on drug development. His main, and what should be a well-taken point is this:

I find it irritating to be harangued by the New York Times about a subject you've clearly made little attempt to understand.

The whole thing , which is not especially long, is very much worth reading simply on its merits. But since we've been quibbling about bias, it brought up a point for me. First off, it's pretty surely an example of a reporter relying on default liberal biases about ruthless unfeeling greedy corporations. [yeah DJ, it happens (-: ]

But the part that interests me is the "failure of understanding" part. In a long boring weekend post below I talked about how our minds grow these elaborate mental architectures of interconnected ideas that can become resistant to alteration. Call these our reflexive biases. Well it occurs to me that the less well one understands some phenomenon, the more likely one is to rely on the interpretive lens of reflexive bias to explain it.

So it's not hard to imagine that whoever composed this unattributed NYT editorial found that a few isolated facts fit quite easily into their elaborate premade script, thus making further inquiry seem quite unnecessary.

And hey, by no means to excuse it. Sloppy stuff that got a well-sereved fisking. Hardened bias is the enemy of insight.

Posted by Brian Keegan at November 12, 2003 08:40 PM