Balance--and Bias
January 1, 1970
Almost anyone, if he will let himself, can bring himself to seeing only one side of a
subject―the side he wants to see. Debaters, for example, may at first approach a question
without prejudice, but as they concentrate on the side they are assigned to, their vision can
become almost as if someone had placed blinders upon them, and they see only the evidence
that favors their side and fail to see the evidence that favors the other side. And soon they have
built, what is to them, at least, a convincing case. But others who are assigned to defend their
side can be equally convinced that the evidence favors their side. This is only one illustration of
how men may become overbalanced of they confine themselves to restricted facts or refuse to
see the side they don’t want to see. This suggests again the hazards of extreme specialization,
and comes again to the question of what would be called “educated illiteracy.” Will Rogers
once remarked that “there is nothing so stupid as an educated man, it you get him off the thing
he was educated in,” which was merely his homely way of suggesting what because a person is
an expert in one field he is not necessarily an expert in others also. It is not safe to assume that
because someone knows one thing well he knows all things well. And this suggests a point of
advice to young people: that in their studies, in their search for understanding, in all their
activities, they do not put blinders on their eyes and look only along narrow lines, and assume
that the particular tangent they are on includes the whole sphere of eternal truth. There are so
many unanswered questions. There is so much that no one knows, that all of us together do not
know. And one of the valuable when we have seen a small segment of something, we haven’t
seen everything there is; that when we have followed one little line of evidence, we haven’t yet
seen all sides. There is danger in presuming to arrive at final conclusions with insufficient facts.