The bias started out with a good intention - &quot;all people should have the same rights and opportunities&quot;.<p>But the official, carefully constructed non-offensive party line reasoning behind it in the US seems to be something like &quot;all people of all types ever are the same&quot;, which is just not true. Any one deviating from the party line is automatically labelled bigot, and anyone defending these people is lumped into the same bucket.<p>Its NOT wrong to make generalizations about people. Our brains are pattern finding machines - we generalize all the time. It IS wrong to use them as justification to treat certain people differently - because a statistic computed on a population of millions doesn&#x27;t really tell you anything about a specific person. So it makes sense to discard the generalization prior - i.e be unbiased and not view someone through stereotypes.<p>Its a hard problem - tolerating honesty but not bigotry, someones right to be offended vs. the offenders right to speak their mind etc etc. But right now US culture is very biased towards not being offensive, at the cost of truth - at the least, this kind of attitude does not belong in research. Research needs to be about truth.