Bias is not what you think it is

People accuse other people of having bias all the time. I might be biased. It upsets me that everyone uses the word wrong. Using it in this imprecise way makes it impossible to address. Most people use the word bias to mean that a piece of writing has a hidden agenda, at best. At worst, they make it a negative-sounding word that simply means opinion. People who breath have opinions but having an opinion doesn't mean that you're biased. You're only biased if you cannot see how your opinion is effecting your view of reality. Donald Trump has a self-centered biased caused by narcissism or just a life in which everything has always gone his way. He cannot see reality as anything other than positive for him. If he honestly believes that the votes counted for him are legitimate while the votes counted against him are not, he has a bias toward himself. Except there is no point in using the word bias in this context. It isn't the right word. Donal Trump isn't biased toward himself. He's selfish, venal, dumb in certain specific ways. Those are sufficient cause for his behavior. Other people/outlets have other reasons for producing the statements they do. Fox News is both interested in holding the attention of their audience and effecting their attention. This right-wing slant on their reporting can be called bias, I suppose, but I think its better to call it what it is: a profit-motive. Fox News shows reality in a specific way that is truthful but exagerated. They don't do it because they're biased. They do it because they want to affect their audience in very specific ways. It can't be biased if its conscious. What is bias? Bias is an unconcious influence on a fact-gatherer that subtly adjusts the way that reporter outputs the facts they gather. As a regular civilian, I'm not biased. I simply have preferences or opinions. I am entitled to those preferences and opinions. But ideally, they come after the facts. I look at the facts. I decide they mean a certain thing to me. That's fine. In classes I used to teach, students would avoid having opinions at all because they didn't want to be biased. But bias is simply the unconscious beliefs that ruin your ability to form fact-based opinions. We all do have certain biases but we can identify them and overcome them, or we can be honest about them and allow an audience to judge the opinions and facts we share knowing where I bias goes. Bias is not having an opinion, believing certain things to be true, voting a certain way, or liberal or conservative. I am biased toward rooting for underdogs. I know this is true so I can consciously try to change my criteria for fandom and root for teams based on their ability to steal bases or the color of their uniforms. Or I can say that I'm fine with this particular bias--I don't need or want to know more about a team than their underdog status--and go on with my life. Bias is not a match to gasoline; it is simply a part of life. In classes, I would break down the formation of civil discourse from the perspective of the fact-gatherer or opinion-sharer this way: We start with an instinct. We feel a certain way about something immediately. (This is not bias though it does help form biases.) We can stop there and say that we "know" something in our gut. From instinct, we move to inclination. We learn a little more and we're inclined to believe something. This is heavily influenced by our biases if we believe that there is any reason or rationality to this choice. We have certain past experiences that incline us to go in certain directions. But smart people do not, or should not stop there. We look at more information. We read. We question. We analyze. And we form an opinion. Ideally, we have also looked at our biases in this process and tried to compensate for them. An opinion isn't a bias. It is thoughtful. There may be biases embedded in them but that is not necessarily so. If we really reallly care about the issue, we can go deeper. Read or creat more data. Do experiments. Test theories and practice real world consequences. After there is more data and more tests, I think we can move from opinions to judgements. Judgements are still not 100 percent provable--everything in life is hard to pin down--but that fact is not a reflection of bias; it's a reflecction of the unknowablility of reality. Instinct--inclination--opinion--judgement. Each can be informed by bias but they aren't bias. Bias is this thing that happens when you don't look at the unconscious assumptions you're making. If you can root out those assumptions, and examine them, you can come as close as is humanly possible to removing bias. Also, for most people, it isn't that important anyway. Bias is part of the equation and reality is part of the equation. People whose eyes aren't willfully turning away from reality (with shouts of "bias") are eventually likely to weigh reality heavier than bias. The mis-definition and over-emphasis on bias is a method by which to strengthen our biases. We become defined by the outline of the things we fight.