Uncaught killers 🔪🩸
“Reality is an illusion.”
—Albert Einstein
> 35,000 decisions | war on air
Eyewitness testimony?
- Our memories are nowhere near as reliable as we once thought.
Murders solved?
- Killers get away with it far more often than the public realizes.
Murder investigations?
- Haunted by confirmation bias, tunnel vision, and wrongful convictions.
Smartness?
- We’re so dumb, we think dumb is measurable.
War on Terror?
- America spent trillions fighting an emotion.
- next time Audience behaviors are human behaviors.
- listening Rush "Working Man"
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Seeing mortality 💀😵
> in my eyes | enlightened
There are countless ways in which our minds commit mental errors throughout the day. We often can't consciously know it's happening or consciously control it, like blinking.
Consider this subtle example:
- Take a surgical procedure with a 10% mortality rate and a 90% survival rate.
- For some reason, the 90% survival rate feels more reassuring to us than the 10% mortality rate, even though it's the same surgical procedure.
- Only the wording and framing are different, but it affects our perceptions nonetheless.
As consumers, we reach similarly irrational conclusions with products that are labeled 90% fat-free instead of 10% fat. We don’t always "see" or grasp such subtleties.
We see what our minds allow us to see.
We're not powerless, however. Writes scientist and author Leonard Mlodinow who's written extensively about perception and psychology:
>> "Evolution designed the human brain not to accurately understand itself but to help us survive. … [However], we can use our conscious minds to study, to identify, and to pierce our cognitive illusions. By broadening our perspective to take into account how our minds operate, we can achieve a more enlightened view of who we are."
Famed psychologist Daniel Kahneman agrees. Modern revelations about the human mind affect everyone, including powerful decision-makers, Kahneman wrote in his own 2021 book, "Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment."
He said our goal shouldn't be to outlaw intuition. But our System 1 intuitive minds, as he calls them, need discipline and enlightenment to operate more usefully and effectively.
It's not just people. Companies and public institutions can be blind to the effects of cognitive errors or thinking lapses or irrational misjudgments:
>> "Professionals seldom see a need to confront noise in their own judgments. … Only occasionally will they be faced with a surprising disagreement, and when that happens, they will generally find reasons to view it as an isolated case."
- next time Getting to know the Will Rogers Paradox.
- listening Rihanna "Needed Me"
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