Okay, this is something that I've been thinking about for a while. It's certainly not original, but I don't think that it's something that gets enough attention. It's quite simple, and sounds so dumb, that I doubt I would bring it up except on this blog.
We believe what we see.
More specifically, we put considerable weight on what we see, as opposed to more comprehensive data that often feels too abstract, but could be more relevant to good decision making.
I've been thinking about this because of my daily commute, which gives me a very narrow and biased image of the city. I form an opinion of Boston based on what I see in these narrowly confined views that are brief and poorly detailed. I look out the window of the train and see the highway jammed with cars and think to myself "that doesn't work." I look at rotting triple-deckers that are close to the railroad tracks and conclude that the entire neighborhood is hopeless.
These opinions that I form have a high probability of being wrong, but they influence my decision making to the point where I write off entire pieces of geography and potential experience based on a few glances. I presume that in a state of nature this instantaneous decision making served a good purpose, because for a hunter/gatherer/primitive farmer the visible world was all that there was. Now, distance has been collapsed and we acquire stimulus from a much broader array of geography, which leads to biases that subvert truth.
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