Instinct vs Data

Too Long; Didn't Read

We humans have a natural tendency of finding patterns in the incompleteness of information available to us. One plus one is greater than two; the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts. We love to make causal connections, we make decisions, judgements, assumptions based on incomplete data on a daily basis. ‘I like this dress, but it won’t suit you’ or ‘He is nice, but not your type’ are peculiar decisions we make everyday without having too much information about the situation or the person being judged. And yet we find ourselves to be correct in a large part of these everyday decisions. It might seem odd at first, but we do have a lot of practice in making these decisions. Most of us are experts in mundane decision making. This ‘blink of an eye’ moment — which Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book titled ‘Blink’ — is a survival instinct. You hear expert comments like ‘this doesn’t feel good’ or ‘I don’t like how it looks’ and often find yourself bewildered at their lack of sound reasoning, yet they are more than often right. Bear in mind that being an ‘expert’ is the key tenet of giving such vague remarks and I often find myself furious when sound logic is absent in an argument. These experts have accumulated a large body of information over a number of years, have practiced for a long time and imbibed these decision making instincts in the core of their personality. They make decisions without knowing why they made them.