[e-mail] comments on What’s a Bias?

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A bias is an obstacle to our goal of obtaining truth, and thus in our way.

In this instance, does “truth” (which many of my academic colleagues believe to be a term that is “evil and Just Not [Used]” refer to some basis in concrete reality with which an understanding of and effective/​efficient ways of working with are our interest/​goal? Or can it refer to some reality (truth) that is greater than we are capable of seeing or measuring directly? My initial sense is that it must be the former because it is in this realm that we can, in fact, use data to make decisions about probability. But as I think about it, I suppose it might be possible, if non-physical truth/​truths existed AND that they manifested somehow in the physically observable world, that we might still be able to gradually refine our thinking and behavior based on probabilities of particular things in the physical world. Maybe?

But this seems to border on attributing non-observable causes to experienced phenomena, which seems uncomfortably close to religion.