Ethical and moral people fall prey to cognitive biases all the time.
It's not about honesty and integrity, if you (or others) don't ask [the right] questions.
We are biased, by ideology, world view, experience (and history/genetics/family/friends/aesthetics) by long- and short-term (self-)interests and so on. With money it's very common to spot the conflict of interest, the bias when people give advice, with other things, it's a lot harder.
That said, people by default are gullible, susceptible to persuasion and so on. People are by nature social animals and easy to misled, to influence, and so on. We are naive.
It takes training to spot the bullshit, even in our own thinking. (And we haven't even mentioned the psychopathologies that can also very seriously undermine our blossoming critical thinking by sheer force of emotions - anxiety/depression/impulsiveness/xenophobia/etnophobia - or via a persistent insistence on fringe patterns - schizoid-type disorders, hallucinations, paranoia.)
> compelled to produce from the data what our boss thought the answer should be.
That's not asinine, that's misconduct. That's fraud.
So, all in all, the situation was never good. The Enlightenment never happened. It started to, but suddenly stopped.
It's not about honesty and integrity, if you (or others) don't ask [the right] questions.
We are biased, by ideology, world view, experience (and history/genetics/family/friends/aesthetics) by long- and short-term (self-)interests and so on. With money it's very common to spot the conflict of interest, the bias when people give advice, with other things, it's a lot harder.
That said, people by default are gullible, susceptible to persuasion and so on. People are by nature social animals and easy to misled, to influence, and so on. We are naive.
It takes training to spot the bullshit, even in our own thinking. (And we haven't even mentioned the psychopathologies that can also very seriously undermine our blossoming critical thinking by sheer force of emotions - anxiety/depression/impulsiveness/xenophobia/etnophobia - or via a persistent insistence on fringe patterns - schizoid-type disorders, hallucinations, paranoia.)
> compelled to produce from the data what our boss thought the answer should be.
That's not asinine, that's misconduct. That's fraud.
So, all in all, the situation was never good. The Enlightenment never happened. It started to, but suddenly stopped.