a really long rant about bias

I spent a lot of money to get a Psychology degree at Trinity Western University. For five years of my life mostly I just read and took notes and listened to people talk about different psychologists, theories, methods, and so on, so one would imagine that I have a lot of knowledge kicking around in my brain about this topic, right? Apparently the time I spent zoned out and/or playing Solitaire on my laptop and/or skipping class to go to movies interfered with the transfer process from short term to long term memory, because I can only remember like three or four things from my entire degree.

One of these things is BIAS. The one thing that I recall from my awful Statistics course is that there is bias in everything. In dog food commercials they say, "90% of people prefer this brand to grocery store brands," but they don't tell you that basically nobody buys their dog food from grocery stores, they buy their dog food from pet stores, so of course most people are going to prefer some crap from a pet store than some weird stuff from the grocery store.

In toothpaste ads they tell you that "9 out of 10 dentists recommend this toothpaste," but they don't tell you how many people they asked (was it only 10?), who they were (were they the buddies of the guy who makes the toothpaste?), or what exactly the question was (Survey Guy: "Would you recommend this toothpaste over brushing your teeth with icing sugar?" Dentist: "Why yes. Yes I would." Survey Guy: "Bam! 9 out of 10.")

Basically what this means is that I don't trust anything. On Tuesday I went to a Bible study I'd never been to before, and somehow the topic of Bible translations came up, and this one guy showed me a chart his church had done, ranking the translations in order of what is best/most accurate (King James) to what was the worst/why even bother (The Message). Another guy said that he uses the ESV because his church had researched it and said it was the best.

What I thought in my brain but didn't say out loud because I was new and they were both really nice and possibly right after all was, "Yeah, right." Because, one time when I was paying attention in a RELS class at TWU, the prof said that the King James Version is called such because King James was all, "Hey, make me a translation of the Bible." Now, Wikipedia tells me that he wanted everything to be accurate and as close to the original text as possible, but he was the king. If he had a particular view of what he thought should be in the Bible, and some dude is the guy in charge of translating the Bible, might he not be desirous of translating it in such a way as reflects what the king wishes it to say? Because otherwise he might become murdered or something?

I also thought that perhaps the research the church read before endorsing the ESV may have, perhaps, been sponsored by the people who sell the ESV. Because they wish everyone to purchase their translation instead of all the other ones. In another course I took, a lady was doing a speech on healthy eating or something similar, and she said that the reason why the Heart and Stroke Foundation endorses Becel, saying it's the best for your heart etc., is because Becel sponsors the Heart and Stroke Foundation. What if someone who worked for the Heart and Stroke Foundation did some rogue research and found out that Becel is actually crap for your heart? I do not think that the H&S F would be like, "Hey, yeah! Go ahead and publish that. We totally don't care that Becel would be so mad they'd stop paying for all our stuff."

Anyway. I'm not sure why I'm so obsessed with bias all of a sudden, in such a way as that I don't really see the point in researching what kind of biblical translation is best, or why we chose some Old Testament laws to continue following and some to not follow anymore, or what kind of toothpaste to use. Because nobody tells the truth in these kinds of things anymore.