Stever's blog

Lateral Thinking post

One of the big misconceptions of Western thinking is that more data and more analysis leads to better decision making. This is just plain false. The above cartoon is a humorous example of this. We tend to interpret data only through the lens of our dominant idea. More evidence simply takes use further along the lines of our own hypothesis. In this case, the above detectives formed an unconscious bias and they are now likely to underemphasize clues that don’t support the hypothesis and overemphasize other clues that do. Most problems in thinking are due to errors in perception rather than errors in logic. IE more mistakes are made from people jumping to the wrong conclusion due to a wrong interpretation of the evidence than by making a strict logical error.