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Recognize the quirks of human cognition
By now there’s a large body of research in cognitive and social psychology on our various quirks and foibles. One of the quirks of human cognition is to be overly influenced by anecdotes. If there is a gory attack in a public square, that doesn’t mean violence is increasing. If there is a suicide that makes the news, that doesn’t mean that suicide is increasing. In general, one can be misled by salient narratives and images, and they may be a poor guide to the underlying trends in a society.
People are overly influenced by available examples in memory. When you try to judge what’s a dangerous activity, you think back to the last example in the news. If you’ve read about a shark attack, or if you’ve just seen Jaws for that matter, then you might be afraid to get into the water. You might think that terrorism represents a major threat to life and limb, whereas in fact fewer people are killed every year by terrorists than by allergic reactions to bee stings.
We tend to reason by stereotype. We don’t take into account how many people there are in different categories, but if someone fits a description, we say that they must be in that category. We are subject to the gambler’s fallacy. If there are a number of, say, heads in a row when you flip a coin, you expect the next one to be tails as if the coin has a desire to appear fair and to exemplify the laws of probability. Whereas, of course the so-called law of averages comes about by dilution, not by compensation.
In general, we’re fooled by randomness. We underestimate how many possible coincidences there are, and therefore, when we stumble upon a coincidence, we read far too much into it. We’re overconfident about our own wisdom and virtue and that of our coalition. We consider ourselves to be on the side of the angels. We tend to attribute misfortune to evildoers, rather than looking for natural processes for the law of averages. We tend to underestimate our own bias. We assume that everyone’s biased but us. That’s very unlikely to be true, and in general, it’s not true, but it is yet another fallacy that we’re vulnerable to.
Make decisions with data
Data are essential to good decision-making because data are reality. Very few facts consist of a simple statement, but often one has to add up across many similar cases because each case has its own quirks, but you look for patterns that can be found when you aggregate the cases together, and because our intuitions are just no match for reality. We think we know how the world works, and no matter how brilliant we are, no matter how sharp our tools are, reality has a way of surprising us. It’s only by looking at data that we can cultivate the proper humility in dealing with an intricately complex world.
In general, gut feelings are a poor guide to action, and despite the popularity of the bestseller called Blink and of the lore in business that certain people have gut “feelings” that allow them to intuit the truth, in general, it’s more often to lead to error if not disaster.