Bias and Analysis Distortion

This comes from a post by Tyler Cowen in the blog Marginal Revolution:

Take some policy, action, or person whom you regard as morally questionable and indeed is morally questionable.

[...]

The odds are that you overrate the badness of those consequences by some considerable degree.

Even very smart people do this.  Sometimes they do it more, because they can come up with more elaborate arguments for why the bad consequences are completely disastrous.

Keep an eye on the distortions introduced by our personal biases or views on the sources. 

This is especially true in forecasting the future. We may be proved wrong after history runs its course. 

I can say this from own experience. Time has the final saying. Don't rush the wheel.