Seeing What We Want to See

This is a perfect case of how bias affects the interpretation of results. Is the ability to stick to a position good or bad? Like a lot of things, "it depends". If you love your wife and she is leaving because she has a hard time sticking to things, then you might like her to be more "conservative". If you want to move and she wants to stay where you are, then you might like her to be more liberal.

The old adage that optimist finds the glass half full, the pessimist half empty, and the engineer finds the glass twice as big as it needs to be, comes to mind. All are "right", but I'd argue that the engineer is much close to "science". Science is NOT about values. It is about data, information, models, etc. When there is an attempt to make science into a religion (as atheists often do, because they realize that "something is missing"), there is a big problem. Science truly is "the God that doesn't care"; by definition.

clipped from scienceblogs.com The claim: Politically liberal brains are better at handling change A recent report in Nature Neuroscience has gotten a lot of press. The headlines proclaim that "left-wing" brains are different from "right wing" brains. Are our brains literally hard-wired to be conservative or liberal? The article in the L.A. Times sure seems to suggest it: Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict. In other words, liberals are more likely than conservatives to have a strong response in the area of the brain used to inhibit responses at the time when they are supposed to inhibit response. So is this why Bush invaded Iraq and Kerry flip-flopped?