&gt; and the field of statistics has devoted extensive effort to the problem of getting good answers out of bad inputs.<p>You are talking about measurement bias. Social bias is not measurement bias. Social bias may be a real statistical distribution; it is called &quot;bias&quot; because it is caused (in the sense of physical causality) and reinforced by biased human perception and the actions that follow. When we talk about &quot;fixing bias&quot; we don&#x27;t mean &quot;offset measurement errors&quot;, but change the actual distribution through action.<p>&gt; Mandating specific outcomes is just a way of ensuring that the predictor can&#x27;t discover certain facts.<p>Exactly. And neglecting feedback from the equations mandates a specific (conservative) outcome. See my reply to barry-cotter for examples of dynamical systems where conservative assumptions can lead to empirically valid yet mathematically wrong results, by failing to detect other stable states: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10874683" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10874683</a><p>If your dynamic system contains feedback, it is quite possible (and very likely) to come up with a model that may be completely predictive, yet quite wrong, and then use that mistake to justify conservatism (what&#x27;s worse, it is ironically a mathematical error that helps paint a political view as a neutral, &quot;mathematical&quot; one).