Observer Bias Quotes

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.

[Microscopic] evidence cannot be presented ad populum. What is seen with the microscope depends not only upon the instrument and the rock-section, but also upon the brain behind the eye of the observer. Each of us looks at a section with the accumulated experience of his past study. Hence the veteran cannot make the novice see with his eyes; so that what carries conviction to the one may make no appeal to the other. This fact does not always seem to be sufficiently recognized by geologists at large.

In one word, to draw the rule from experience, one must generalize; this is a necessity that imposes itself on the most circumspect observer.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

People read so much into what I do. It's fascinating to me because some of it's probably there, but I haven't thought of it.

Who will observe the observers?

Anytime somebody tells me they saw 'Safety Not Guaranteed' in the theater, my answer is, 'That was you?'

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

...it is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Who am I, really? I prefer to leave that up to the observer, because I will never finish answering that.

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

There are movies where we are interested in seeing people's lives without agreeing with what they're doing.

Call it a case of observer bias on my part, but Humanist Paganism seems to be an emerging option for those who want to be part of the Pagan community, but who want to be a little more intellectual about their practices, and they really don't care about the 'woo' anymore.

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake.

I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.