If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Blog Post

By ROBERT MCNUTT I don’t know why, but even as a young person I never could make sense of the saying, “seeing is believing”. Seeing, vision, is nothing more than a data collection instrument, not an arbiter of insight. I saw my wife frown at me the other day, for example, after I claimed to have washed the dishes so thoroughly that no spot of grease could be left behind. I have made this claim before and been incorrect, so the frown, the data, triggered an anticipation of being rebuffed. However, nothing of that sort followed. I asked, Why the frown?” She responded, “I just cut my finger”. The frown was obvious, the cause unclear. I believed I was about to be reprimanded and missed the chance to notice her accident.  This story suggests that a truer aphorism might be, instead, then, that “believing is seeing”. These comments about bias in interpretation of data are not new. Consider the condition of “hindsight bias”; once we know, we change our minds to show how correct we now can be. How about, “confirmation bias”; since we believe we know the diagnosis we find information to justify that diagnosis, eschewing contrary data. Counselors tell us all that if you change your mind, you change your life. But changing our minds is not that easy, and, in medical care, it is extremely difficult because of deeply held beliefs that shape the ideas, which shape the actions, which produce the consequences of costly, wasteful care.  So, let’s examine some belie...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Data Decision-making evidence Source Type: blogs