Thursday, March 6, 2008

Don't Believe Everything You Think

I just took in the book, Don't Believe Everything You think by Thomas Kida. If you can see the picture, the premise is that we make mistakes, 6 primary ones, in our thinking.

The 6 Basic Ones are:

1. We prefer stories to statistics.
In other words, we will confirm things to normal and true based upon anecdotal evidence, rather than on actually seeing what really happens.

2. We seek to confirm, not to question, or ideas.
We will boost the value of anything that confirms what we think is right and disregard anything that refutes it.

3. We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.
Don't we develop superstitions by doing some random act and then seeing something else, either good or bad, happen soon after? We then correlate whatever that random thing was to a particular outcome, when the outcome really had more to do with random chance or divine intervention or whatever than it does with our repeated random act.

4. We sometimes misperceive the world around us.
Understatement. We also can misperceive the motives of others.

5. We tend to oversimplify our thinking.
It is easy to not discover or to ignore important information when making decisions. Waiting for too much information can, of course, put us in a state of paralysis, unable to make a decision. However, disregarding pertinent information and oversimplifying things can lead to bad decisions.

6. We have faulty memories.
It is easy to misremember what really happened.

I didn't agree with everything this guy had to say, but it was helpful to look at some common thinking patterns and why they can be a disservice to us in all areas of life.

What are some of these that you are guilty of engaging in, to your harm?

Why is this underlining all my words?

1 comment:

agentpipes said...

Well, I can certainly remember doing all of those thought processes. All of my knee-jerk reactions are followed by some sort of a mind-jerk (all done by a big-jerk).