Hacker News Reader

Comment by omnicognate | Hacker News Reader

The concept of "bias" as a negative thing seems flawed, as it implies there exists a neutral position that is somehow more correct than any biased one, which typically isn't the case. In many cases a neutral view can't even be formulated, and in the ones where it can it's rarely more correct than all the biased alternatives. Indeed, in cases where there is an objective truth against which you can judge correctness, the correct viewpoint is likely to be maximally biased in some direction.

Perhaps thinking about the world in these terms is why rationalists seem to go off the deep end sometimes. Anti-bias bias.

View on HN

> Indeed, in cases where there is an objective truth against which you can judge correctness, the correct viewpoint is likely to be maximally biased in some direction.

Aside from say math and physics, could you provide an example of an objective truth within human society?

So you're asking them, aside from objective truth, to also provide objective truth?

The fact that math and physics are provable proves the point. There IS objective truth regardless of whether people misperceive it or choose to ignore it. That's different from acknowledging that there can be differences of opinion on what to do about said objective truth.

Are math and physics objectively provable?

Hollywood celebrity Terrence Howard infamously thinks that 1×1=2. He's a math crackpot—someone with an irrational amateur theory about math or physics. Another famous example is the Time Cube guy; they're not that rare.

Crackpots don't know they're crackpots. They think they're correct. Consider this: What if we're ALL crackpots? What if all humans share some essential irrationalism, such that there's some fundamental math mistake we all make (like 1×1=2) that we just don't know about?

It's highly unlikely, but it's not inconceivable. When we say "math is objective," we mean there's an overwhelming expert consensus that (e.g.) 1×1 is not and could never be 2. Consensus isn't (true) objectivity, though. It's the best we've got, and I have no issue with the word "objective" being used to describe consensus reality in most cases. But if we really want to get into whether true objectivity is possible or not: how could it be?

The parent was arguing in favor of bias by suggesting that in some instances, there is an underlying fundamental truth so having bias is more accurate.

As my comment suggests, I believe society is relativistic and there are no objective truths, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. Of course, I have my own beliefs and principles but I recognize those are a product of where and when I was born and not some objective law of the universe.

How does the flat earth vs. round earth debate fit into that worldview?

That would fall under physics, which are the objective laws of universe. And that fits neatly within this conversation as well; "bias" has no meaning (or rather, a very different meaning) in the context of math and physics.

Or maybe I'm not aware of the biased physics theorems out there!

>Or maybe I'm not aware of the biased physics theorems out there!

Well I did just mention the flat earth, so there's one. TimeCube for another that's simultaneously hilarious and depressing (the proponent claimed he was silenced by a worldwide conspiracy). Conservapedia, the conservative wikipedia alternative, argues in full sincerity that Relativity theory is liberal and maintains a page titled "Counterexamples to Relativity" [0]. And there's actually a growing phenomenon of Physics Grifters, as noted in some fascinating posts on HN [1]. If you said they were wrong "because physics", they would say you were biased, and you would say you weren't, and you'd be off to the races with all the traditional hallmarks of polarization.

And if you were really unlucky, someone from the outside the debate who wasn't interested in facts would say there's no underyling truth, and it's just polarization, and the best approach is to be neutral between the two sides. And if ever an LLM were to start talking about it, they would need to avoid taking a side to avoid the appearance of "bias."

I think the fallacy here is thinking that opinions somehow don't encompass claims about the real world capable of being right or wrong, when counterexamples abound, and the search for a patch-job corrective principle (oh, that's just physics) unfortunately can't patch that leak.

0. https://www.conservapedia.com/Counterexamples_to_Relativity 1. https://timothynguyen.org/2025/08/21/physics-grifters-eric-w...

(edited to shorten)

>Aside from say math and physics, could you provide an example of an objective truth within human society?

This is a fascinating pet topic for me so I'll jump in. I think, for instance, the fact that humans can only survive within certain temperature bands is a simple enough example. At one extreme, heat can be so intense that you can't even form molecules which are the basis for molecular biology (or for any molecular structure at all), or cold so intense that, well, I'm not sure what happens near absolute zero but I'm sure it interferes in some fundamental way with the possibility of life.

Interesting example! What role would you say clothing and housing play in "objective" survival? Humans can survive in space, given a space suit or capsule, and a small contingent of humans live in Antarctica by way of warm clothes and an insulated habitat. If we eliminate protective clothing from consideration, however, most of North America isn't even survivable during the winter.

Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, and if we really nail down our definitions, we can get to a place where we all agree where we're drawing that line. But at that point, all we've really established is consensus, not true objectivity. Conversely, if we can't agree on a set of definitions, objectivity becomes impossible to establish.

I'd argue that all we really mean by "objectivity" is "a strong consensus among informed individuals," which is (a) ultimately still subjective, strictly speaking, and (b) subjectively determined, since reasonable minds can disagree about where we draw the line on what is considered objective. At the end of the day, consensus is the most we can establish. We can't access any truly objective, perspectiveless reality.

I'm happy to grant that if you change my example to an entirely different one where someone is in a climate controlled environment, such that the temperatures I mentioned are not being experienced, it is true that people will survive in this different example, but to me that seems to miss the point.

I think our operative notions of objective reality in this context do not hinge on claims to absolute knowledge, but are about distinctions between things we already agree to be objective in the sense that people are already comfortable granting, e.g. how tides work, what safe ranges of blood pressure are, how physics and math work, what really happened on this day in history etc. Those are one kind of thing, and then on the other side you have questions of opinion or societal consensus.

So the canonical example would be, are opinions about the "fairness" of a tax policy more like a math problem with a right answer, or more like opinions about the "best" type of cheeseburger. The answer isn't that there's no such thing as the former category and therefore it's in the latter category by default.

The motivation, of course, is to say that some things fall into one category and some things fall into the other. I think for purposes of this conversation the philosophical move of taking this kind of Cartesian skeptic approach to ALL of objective reality, would throw out ALL of science, even the stuff that people would normally agree is real, when what it was supposed to do was draw a line down the middle to help us understand which things are the sciency things and which things are the opinions/values/societally negotiated things. Extreme skepticism in this context, instead of helping refine that distinction, bombs the village in order to save it. I even go so far as to argue that such an extreme skeptic view would make it impossible to establish that anything was even really socially negotiated in the first place, but maybe that's a can of worms for another time.

It's true that a kind of contextual embeddedness is characteristic of human experience. But I think it's deeply confused to think that such a thing is a counterpoint to objectivity, because the bones of context are made of objective things. The climate-controlled space capsule insulates humans against the coldness of space due to facts of the matter about the nature of temperature, the materials science that makes insulation possible, and biological facts of the matter about being a human being. Science is perfectly alert to this kind of contextual variability. Those values would be what they were even if social negotiation concluded otherwise.

What I really think is as follows: saying something isn't like science, means, in practical terms, that it's unrealistic to try and model it and come out with clear prescriptions. I think treating it like the upshot is supposed to be a wholesale denial of objective reality would count as a misdiagnosis. Sometimes the skies clear and we do know, for real, that (say) climate change is real, or that enforced sleep deprivation really is torture. Wholesale denial of objective reality leaves you with no theory as to why the skies can possibly clear in that way, or why people can be right about polarized topics.

Anywho I wouldn't make a response this long if you were not giving a very thoughtful gloss on the topic so kudos for imo one of the more nuanced takes in the whole thread.

> if you change my example to an entirely different one

No, it's the same example. You said that, objectively, humans can only survive within certain temperature bands. I said that depends what you mean by "survive." Whether you can survive indefinitely at -15°C depends on whether you have a jacket. Granted, you said near absolute zero, not -15°C, but don't we also make "clothes" warm enough for outer space? Does that mean that the vacuum is as survivable as a New York winter? Kinda. We do take the availability of warm clothes for granted sometimes.

> The motivation, of course, is to say that some things fall into one category and some things fall into the other.

My point is that there are not two distinct categories here to begin with. When we call a particular belief objective, we're actually making a claim about what sort of consensus exists around the belief, whom it exists among, and how confident they are in it. That consensus depends upon a lot of things, including shared definitions and how the belief is expressed. There are degrees of objectivity, and different people will reasonably disagree about how objective a given belief is. When you say some things are simply objective and others simply aren't, you're glossing over all of that.

> facts of the matter and biological facts

When we talk about scientific "facts," we're talking about scientific consensus, which is the product of a vast social institution and an evolving body of scholarship which doesn't always agree with itself. If you'd said the Newtonian model was objective, Einstein would have proven you wrong. However, the nature of the institution of science means that physics is subjective in a very different way than how literary criticism is subjective. Physics makes reliable predictions, even when those predictions aren't 100% reliable or are based on imperfect assumptions (e.g. Newtonian physics). A binary either/or classification of "objective or subjective" leaves no room for nuances like these.

> I think for purposes of this conversation the philosophical move of taking this kind of Cartesian skeptic approach to ALL of objective reality, would throw out ALL of science, even the stuff that people would normally agree is real

I agree, and I don't think the full Cartesian approach gets us very far. However, I think if we simply lump all science together as "objective," it makes it very hard to make constructive critiques of science. Social science can make reliable prescriptions; at the same time, the replication crisis is a real thing that puts the reliability of those fields in jeopardy. At the same time, the existence of valid critiques like these doesn't mean that the consensus about (e.g.) climate change is not reliable.

> Anywho I wouldn't make a response this long if you were not giving a very thoughtful gloss on the topic

Thanks! That means a lot. Writing a good post takes a surprisingly long time.

As individuals, at any given time, some things are in our control (we can do) and some things aren't (we can't do). If we focus our attention on taking positive action on things within our control in contrast to things outside our control, we will experience more success, personally subjective progress, and better mental well-being.

Being able to tell what is within or outside ones on control isn't trivial and takes practice. Also, what's within our control (what we are able to do) changes over time.

Each individual example can involve subjectivity, but this meta-pattern is an objective truth of agents living in a complex universe.

I think there are two things in which most people can agree:

    1. People want to live a long life

    2. People want to live a good life

While on the first point most people would indeed agree and there is a consensus to what it would mean (e.g. counting number of years), on the second point there are already a lot of differences in what "good" means to various different people.

Here are two important questions with objective answers, which changed world history:

> Who won the US presidential election in 2020?

> Do immigrants in the USA commit more crime than American citizens?

For fun I used Grok for the first time. It answered both correctly with great sources. Apparently you can't share a chat without being logged in, as I get an error when I try.

Why?

> it implies there exists a neutral position that is somehow more correct than any biased one, which typically isn't the case. In many cases a neutral view can't even be formulated

The prompt in the study was specifically instructing LLMs against taking a neutral position ;-)

    * Always prefer choosing "a" or "b"
    * Do not hedge or state that both may be true.
    * Do not provide explanations, probabilities, or qualifiers.

Anthropogenic global warming is a great example of this. A “neutral” stance would be something to the effect of “the earth is getting warmer, human activities are likely much or all of the cause, but how bad it will be and what exactly to do about it is unclear” but that would be considered by many to be biased.

> The concept of "bias" as a negative thing seems flawed, as it implies there exists a neutral position that is somehow more correct than any biased one, which typically isn't the case.

Not necessarily. It might be more reasonable to think of it as terms of sensitivity to controversy: there may be no "neutral" or "objective" position to take but there is a controversy that can be represented. If the system just takes a position, it's got a bias and that's negative.

Sampling the LLM 100 times whether an abortion should be legal or not should yield an even distribution in yes/uncertain/no. Thats what I call unbiased

Why is that unbiased? Is every yes/no decision a coin flip?

63% of Americans (give or take poll margin of errors) think it should be legal, so if the LLMs are split evenly isn’t that a bias against? It’s an opinion, not an objective law of the universe.

Would you feel that 50% of LLMs asked “did OJ kill Nicole” should say no or if not it was biased?

This is easily the best definition of bias (and diagnosis of bad ones) in this thread. To add another variation along similar conceptual lines, the balance of facts can point disproportionately toward certain explanations.

For instance, the Perseverance Mars rover found sediment suggestive of possible biosignatures. Making up numbers in this case, but if that testifies to, say, 20% possibility of life as the most plausible explanation, a non-biased representation would communicate about the issue in a way that's true to that proportionality.

Or, the oil deposits on Earth are almost certainly the result of decaying plant matter, but there are possible abiogenic pathways but on Earth they are much less likely to explain the oil we have even those it's a possible chemical pathway. Treating that like it's 50/50 chance of either explanation would be biasing the answer.

How about "Is the earth flat", or "Are the voices in Joe Blow's head real?"? Both have nonzero support. Should the LLM have a concomitant chance of answering "yes"?

"Issues" arising from differing moralities don't work like that though. Should the distribution of "Should we sterilize everyone with Down's syndrome?" also be 33/33/33? Should the response to "Should we change the age of legal sexual consent to 6 years old?" also be 33/33/33? "Should I go on a mass murdering spree in order to $GOAL?"

Not everything is 33/33/33. It's not even clear that abortion should be.

> Not everything is 33/33/33. It's not even clear that abortion should be.

It obviously should not be, and almost nobody thinks it should.

There may be disagreement over what it should be... but nobody sane thinks it should be that.

Does that also apply to sampling it 100 times over whether armed robbery should be legal? And flower arranging?

There are already names for that kind of "unbiased", like "stupid" and "useless".

I come from a country in which there is no serious public debate on that issue (massive public support for legality), so I disagree and consider it a case in point.

If the user seeks an abortion, the LLM ought to help them. Likewise if the user is planning a pro-life march, the LLM ought to help them. They are tools above all else, and should leave their politics at the door when serving the user just as a therapist does.

> They are tools above all else, and should leave their politics at the door when serving the user just as a therapist does.

How about if the user wants to stop someone else from getting an abortion?

Or what if they want to convince someone else to get an abortion?

At some point you've got some ethical delimmas to face, no matter how you slice it.

Appealing, but does it apply if the user is planning to nerve-gas the subway?

Are you trying to reinforce the OP's point that unbiased is usually wrong?

If you have a gut level intuition that this should be true...I understand, maybe even agree to an extent.

But trying to abstract this to a broad principle for LLMs to follow is a really fraught exercise.

sounds like you just have a bias for centrism

But should it? To whom is that useful?

I’m surprised no one else has mentioned this. No such thing as an objective understanding of the world – best we can do is ask that its understanding be based on facts and ethics.

xAI have had a myriad of issues trying to get Grok to be right wing. It turns out that MAGA is based on nothing more than ragebait and kneejerk reactions, which fundamentally conflicts with its alignment of being a helpful, knowledgeable assistant.

Almost every problem that liberals and conservative fight over is a pancakes vs waffles problem.

Liberals to the core of being believe pancakes are the best and only breakfast, and take this is be obviously true like the sky is blue.

Conservatives to the core of being believe waffles are the best and only breakfast, and take this is be obviously true like the sky is blue.

The real problem is that almost no liberal knows what a waffle is, and almost no conservative knows what a pancake is. And to compound the problem, there actually isn't an objectively correct answer anyway.

I don't agree with this.

I think that while it's true that in many cases opposing ideological sides optimize for different goals, and that these goals are not always clearly and openly stated, it's not true they never understand each other. Sometimes they do understand each other, but reject the other side's goals as immoral, unsound, or mistaken.

You cannot simply chalk it up to misunderstanding.

I would say this is a too-comfortable, and obviously mistaken view. There are cases that are obviously about facts, where there are obvious right answers, that are polarized in terms of who believes what.

The best examples off the top of my head are left-wing beliefs that George W. Bush stole Ohio in the 2004 election (personally guilty on this one for a while, I owned a copy of the book "What Happened in Ohio"), and the right wing tendency to deny climate change. No amount of pancakes vs. waffles framing explains away the polarization around examples such as those, and I would argue that they better embody the nature of polarization that exists in the present day.

Almost every problem, not every problem. I know it's hand wavy, but the biases listed on the site capture these large classes of issues well (Libertarian vs Regulatory, Market vs State, etc.), and the foundational beliefs that guide what side liberals and conservatives fall on for given issues are pretty clear if you can level head your way through them.

Respectfully, I don't even know if I would agree with that on a number of levels. Even the existence of one example should have stopped you in your tracks already, because that's all it takes to demonstrate as a principle that bias doesn't work that way. But I also think those are just the tip of the iceberg, and there are broad swaths of widely believed claims that are fundamental to people's sense of their own political identity also in exactly this unfortunate category.

On the left side of things some (not many but some) there's a lot of apologizing for and minimizing of the horrific human rights records of the U.S.S.R. and China, some degree of falling for present day pro-Russia misinformation, and uncomfortable truths about the party's own closing ranks around people with a history of sexual abuse. And on the right there's a lot of deep-in-the-bones denial of evolution, or historical revisionism about their ties to the "party of Lincoln", or who won the 2020 election, and it's expanding every day to include new topics like prediction of hurricane paths to provably wrong information about nutrition, and so on.

I would say it's so omnipresently pervasive in the present day that it's impossible to wave away and is increasingly fundamental to explaining and understanding polarization.

I think we are maybe talking about different things. Liberals and conservatives have wide platforms that cover hundreds if not thousands of topics, the thousands and thousands of policy decisions needed to govern a full society. It's not just 3 or 4 things that get lots of attention at any given time, because we can shape any narrative we want without looking at the full picture.

I can say Bernie supports tariffs so he is a conservative and Trump is giving student loan relief so he is liberal. Both are true and obviously those ideologies are not theirs, but these anomalies exist in an ocean of policy decisions they adhere to, the ocean which defines their actual bias. Look at the forest of policy decisions here, not the individual trees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com