“Knowing how to combat your own confirmation bias helps remove that huge handicap that we all share—the tendency for our beliefs to drift toward what we want to be true.”

—  Greg Craven

Source: What's the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate (2009), Chapter 3 "Our Glitchy Brains" (p. 66)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Knowing how to combat your own confirmation bias helps remove that huge handicap that we all share—the tendency for our…" by Greg Craven?
Greg Craven photo
Greg Craven10
American teacher and writer

Related quotes

Jerry Coyne photo

“Religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 29

David Duke photo

“What we really want to do is to be left alone. We don't want Negroes around. We don't need Negroes around. We're not asking— you know, we don't want to have them, you know, for our culture. We simply want our own country and our own society. That's in no way exploitive at all. We want our own society, our own nation….”

David Duke (1950) American White nationalist, white supremacist, writer, right-wing politician, and a former Republican Louisiana …

Interview with Evelyn Rich (March 1985)

Robert Greene photo

“Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.”

Robert Greene book Mastery

Source: Mastery

Daniel Defoe photo

“We never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.”

Daniel Defoe La vie et les aventures de Robinson Crusoe

Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 10, Tames Goats.

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Belief means not wanting to know what is true.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 52
The Antichrist (1888)
Variant: Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.

Czeslaw Milosz photo

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Lupe Fiasco photo

“A definition of ignorance is not KNOWING what we DO & improvement is handicapped when we don't DO what we KNOW.”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

Rules 2 Rule

Eliezer Yudkowsky photo

“Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think/ (October 2007)

Northrop Frye photo

“There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either righting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we're taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence

George Steiner photo

“Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VIII (p. 291).

Related topics