Midline Monday: finding the gorilla
Certainty from one angle is just a well-lit blind spot.
Weekly Reflections
In 2013, Schoenfeld & Ioannidis picked 50 random ingredients out of a cookbook. Bacon, eggs, celery, bread. Then they went digging through the medical literature for studies linking each one to cancer.
They found what they were looking for.
Almost every ingredient had a study connecting it to cancer, some claiming it caused cancer, others claiming it prevented it.
There were a number of cases where competing studies claimed ingredients both caused and prevented cancer.
When you go looking for a link, in a big enough pile of data, you’ll find one.
In 1999. Simons and Chabris conducted the “invisible gorilla” experiment. They showed subjects a video of two teams passing basketballs and asked them to count the number of passes. An easy task that required focus, most people got the count right.
Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the frame, thumps its chest, and walks off.
And half the viewers never saw it.
They were focused on something else, that focus made them blind to the rest of the world around them.
The through line here is the same; if we search hard enough for a conclusion, we’ll manufacture one and if we focus hard enough on one thing, we could miss what’s standing right in front of us.
Two ways we can reach a wrong conclusion, with certainty.
In our world of algorithms and AI, these human tendencies are even more pernicious. Clinging to a narrow set of facts or missing the gorilla is all too easy.
For the important decisions in work and in life, it’s important to look we a problem from more than one angle before deciding we understand it. Ask people who see it differently than we do. Assume there’s more than one “right” way and more than one “true” story about what’s happening.
No single perspective, including our own, is the whole picture. Certainty from one angle is just a well-lit blind spot.
Go find the gorilla.
That’s the work.
Onward 🖤