going to places where you don’t normally go

An old joke says that if you torture the data long enough, it will confess. With enough work, you can distort data to make it say what you want it to say.

We all hold some beliefs, and that’s fine. It’s all part of being human. What’s not OK, though, is when we let those beliefs inadvertently come into the way we form our hypotheses.

We can see this tendency in our everyday lives. We often interpret new information in such a way that it becomes compatible with our own beliefs. We read the news on the site that conforms most closely to our beliefs. We talk to people who are like us and hold similar views. We don’t want to get disconcerting evidence because that might lead us to change our worldview, which we might be afraid to do.

One way to fight this bias is to critically examine all your beliefs and try to find disconcerting evidence about each of your theories. By that, I mean actively seeking out evidence by going to places where you don’t normally go, talking to people you don’t normally talk to, and generally keeping an open mind.

Rahul Agarwal writing in Built in