I just started reading the book Economic Facts and Fallacies, by Thomas Sowell.
The concepts and ideas the author is putting forth are fascinating.
I find them fascinating not because I’m an economic nerd but more so because the author provides many examples of how humans are good at “imagining things” that are completely the opposite of reality.
I’ve been thinking and reading about that topic for a while, and his book is yet ANOTHER example that this kind of problem isn’t a “field” specific problem.
It’s a “species” specific problem.
What I mean by that is that this phenomenon keeps repeating itself… no matter the context or field.
I’ve seen it in the startup world, I’ve seen it in the tech world, In the business world, In the coaching world, In the environmental field, In the medical and health field…
And I see it with my students all the time!
Every week (literally), I’ll ask one of my students to describe me what they are seeing in their posture/mechanics, and they sometimes go on and give an answer that is entirely the opposite of what is actually going on.
Seeing that, I ask them to draw me lines or take screenshots of what they see so they can support their conclusions and when they do it and 9 times out of 10, once they appropriately dissected the problem, they will say something like:
“Oh… it’s actually quite the opposite of what I said!”.
Now the thing is that we all do this at some point in our lives… Because that’s how our biology tends to operate! (Daniel Kahneman explains this very well in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.)
That’s because on the short term, it’s a lot less energy to AVOID jumping through all the hoops to try and validate/invalidate our observations and conclusions… And it’s a lot easier to assume something, sometimes even to the point where we make things up!
However, that catch with this is that on the long term, it costs us way more energy to patch for the bad conclusions we came up with.
If we expect to level up as a society and species, this character trait of ours to see false things will gradually have to go.
I’m not fully sure of how this will take shape, though. I’m guessing that at some point, it’ll have to be something like Neuralink that will better synchronize our limbic system with our prefrontal cortex if we ever wish to correct the problem on a planetary scale.
In the meantime, I guess a good place to start is to at least be AWARE of this tendency of ours, and then find ways to account for it, and a good way to start doing this could be by asking yourself “How do I know I’m right?”.
I’m still working on the right wording to fully describe this whole phenomenon in a simple way, and I’m also curious to see if there’s some sort of roadmap or process that one could follow to avoid falling in the trap.
I’m currently doing it with the Problem-Solving Workshop for the fields of training and rehab, but I’d like to find a way to scale this to other fields.
If we can look at the best athletes and analyze their efficient patterns, and then copy these patterns using our neurological system… We can surely do it with our decision-making process and get better at cognitive bias-free thinking.
I mean… yes, of course we can!
Many people are doing it. But these people tend to be rare.
So, is there a way to make it more accessible and less energy-demanding?