Wisdom Of The Week

"These are findings that are incredibly powerful and important. We think we see with our eyes, but the reality is that we largely see with our brains. Our brain is a master at giving us what we expect to see. It’s all about expectation, and when things violate expectation we are just unaware of them. We go around the world with a sense that we pay attention to lots of things. The reality is that we notice much less than we think. And if we notice so much less than we think, what does that mean about our ability to figure out things around us, to learn and improve? It means we have a serious problem. I think this book has done a tremendous job in showing how even in vision, which is such a good system in general, we are poorly tooled to make good decisions.

If you think about the financial crisis, it was to some degree caused by conflicts of interest. You pay a group of people a lot of money to see reality in a distorted way, and lo and behold they are able to do it. Now you would think that in the case of people working for Lehman Brothers, for example, that the firm wanted them to see reality correctly. But they paid them to see reality incorrectly. What ended up happening is that people saw reality as they wanted to see it, not as it really was. This is an example of this issue coming into play in a big, important and quite devastating way."

- Dan Airely on The Invisible Gorilla