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COMMENTARY | Noah Brier

Believing (Your Own) Hype

June 8, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 2 COMMENTS

One of the side effects of this our GE Adventure is that I've become fascinated by healthcare (I'm actually quite proud of some of my writing on the topic over at the site). Anyway, during a conversation recently someone at GE recommended I read How Doctors Think, which I ordered and started last week.

It's an excellent account of the cognitive mistakes doctors make (I'm about 3/4 of the way through). One of the more interesting points thus far to me is about how doctor's begin to believe their own hype. In discussing the kinds of mistakes he had made in his career, Dr. James Lock said, "I learned that I need to be more circumspect about making these predictions. I have to be more clear to myself that even though the reasoning seems extremely tight, I am still making it up. And you absolutely have to recognize that what you think you know can have limitations." [Emphasis mine.]

I've always felt like everyone was making it up as they went along. No matter how buttoned up any person or company seems, they can't possibly know everything. One of the big themes in the book is the difference between the people that recognize that limitation and work with it and those that begin to take their own approach as gospel. That latter is a very dangerous thing.

Tags: culture, healthcare, psychology


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COMMENTS

1Taylor Davidson

"Echochambers of one" are dangerous places.

A slight tangent: I have a belief that we create these "buttoned-up" personas of ourselves because it's what society breeds and rewards; business and culture use traditional heuristics to create sterotypes, and anything (or anybody) that cannot be reduced to a simple sterotype is just too hard for society to understand, to promote and to reward.

If we rewarded people (money, popularity, etc.) for admitting to limitations, to admitting to complexity and to not understanding things perfectly, then it would be more prevalent; but as a society, we don't. We want (and reward) all-knowing heros, and we tear them down once their fallibility is proved.

I also have a belief that once society is used to living a more public life, that once we've all been burned once in public, then perhaps we will stop vilifying the mistakes of "public" people. A hope :)

June 8, 2009

2Charles

Good stuff, Noah. Actually, South Park had a reference recently to something called "mental gymnastics" that reminds me of these thoughts. Basically, the episode is about how people with a giant ego will skew the reality of a situation or memory in order to protect their ego from getting hurt.

Assuming that you are correct about something without questioning your limitations is the same thing - you're skewing the validity of your own experience.

(link - be warned... it's South Park.)

June 9, 2009