So many disclaimers about bias. I wonder how far back you have to go before the bias isn’t an issue. Not because it unbiased, but because we don’t recognize or care about the biases present.

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gbear605 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think there is such a time. As long as writing has existed it has privileged the viewpoints of those who could write, which was a very small percentage of the population for most of history. But if we want to know what life was like 1500 years ago, we probably want to know about what everyone's lives were like, not just the literate. That availability bias is always going to be an issue for any time period where not everyone was literate - which is still true today, albeit many fewer people.

	▲	carlosjobim 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That was not the question. The question is when do you stop caring about the bias? Some people are still outraged about the Bible, even though the writers of it has been dead for thousands of years. So the modern mass produced man and woman probably does not have a cut-off date where they look at something as history instead of examining if it is for or against her current ideology.

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owenversteeg 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on the specific issue, but race would be an interesting one. For most of recorded history people had a much different view of the “other”, more xenophobic than racist.

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mmooss 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Was there ever such a time or place?

There is a modern trope of a certain political group that bias is a modern invention of another political group - an attempt to politicize anti-bias.

Preventing bias is fundamental to scientific research and law, for example. That same political group is strongly anti-science and anti-rule-of-law, maybe for the same reason.