October 31, 2025
Image: Pixabay
“We need to take insights more
seriously. Improving performance depends
on reducing errors but it also depends on increasing insights. If we eliminate all errors, we still haven’t
generated any new and innovative ideas…. Sure, we need to worry about making
bad judgments. But we also should
celebrate our capacity for insights.” --Gary
Klein, Snapshots of the Mind (2022)
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
-- Carl Jung
The human brain is a binary thinking system, meaning we
think in black and white. Our brains are most alert to contrasts and
extremes: good versus bad, win or lose,
like or dislike, on or off, yes or no; the brain thinks in extremes before
nuances or ranges.
“Safe or dangerous?” is the survival question meant to sharpen
our instincts and alarm us to flee, freeze, or fight. It is built into our
first impressions of people new to us. First impressions guide our immediate
behavior, acting as snapshots to trip split-second decisions, not long-term
planning. We overrate small risks and
small chances in the quest for total assurance, the basis for the structured
(advance) settlement business, which pays out money awards today rather than
over the span of years, quickly but at far less their face value (Daniel Kahneman,
2011). We favor a smaller loss over a much
larger gain that also carries the greater loss potential. The male mind has a higher risk tolerance than
the female.
Epistemic certainty
Epistemic certainty (from study of knowledge, epistemology) is
rational and logical, distinguished from psychological certainty, which is
subjective—person-based, not provable, and an aspect of belief, not knowledge. A strong feeling of certainty does not
guarantee any truth value, but is highly motivational as an article of identity
and perception ability.
Epistemic facts are core truths so well established—like
math principles—that they can’t be challenged until some enterprising thinker
ventures outside their sealed box. Such
knowledge is beyond sensory experience, supportable by evidence, justifiable by
expert credentials, and is consistent with other truths. Examples are 2+2 = 4, triangles have three sides,
and a doctor’s diagnosis based on test results.
No remote viewing or other classified pseudoscience.
These truths also form an implicit bias, unrecognized
because so ingrained, but objective and provable beyond question. If all knowledge were this agreed-on, conflicts
would not come from differing visions of agreed-on truth. These are the absolutes that provide a sense
of security and offer conflict avoidance.
However, the well-guarded secret within professions is that even armed
with established facts, judges make different decisions based on a range of
factors (is the trial before or after lunch?), as do lawyers, doctors,
professors, engineers, appraisers, and religious leaders.
Certainty-seeking
The human bias toward 100%-certain outcomes is a known fact
of behavioral psychology. We want things to be absolute, locked and certain, within
the past as well as in forecasting the future.
Going for such absolute assurance, however, can prove costly to
opportunities and success.
A colleague of mine has mentioned that he would be glad to
compete for professional prizes and awards, but with a caveat: as a
precondition, he’d need to be assured in advance that he had already won. (He really said this.) He then declared that this lack of certainty
was the reason he never competed in any available contests. I remarked that I couldn’t think of many
honest contests that operated that way. There
are no guarantees. Life isn’t designed
to work that way. Uncertainty is the
rule—and people try to fight it all the time.
Such is the ultimate state everyone everywhere lives within.
And the problem is not that information is scarce or incomplete. It’s that our perception and processing are
biased, and that our biased lenses distort whatever they behold. We have to get off our own viewing stand to
know what we are actually observing. But
this introspective correction is difficult even for experts in decision-making
science.
We are the only species that is all too aware that we are going
to die. That is true certainty; that no matter how long the lifetime, no one
gets out alive. However, this isn’t a
truth that’s easily lived with; the death prospect is profoundly innervating
and a major depression pitfall. How do
we deal with this reality? “Maybe,” in
the absence of any certainty about the timing of death, “we should just assume
that we’re going to live a long time,” says neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. Maybe acting immortal is the answer to having
no answers about mortality—the ultimate extension of the “unskilled and unaware”
study showcasing the widespread illusion of overconfidence.
Isn’t the immortality assumption both deluded and uncannily
useful to the purposes of living a confident and fulfilled life? Psychologist Gary Klein’s statement puts this
illusion in profile: “Similarly, I think
we need a positive cognitive psychology that appreciates the sources of power
people use to make sense of complex and dynamic situations” (2022).
Our need for cognitive closure leads to an illusion of
validation and control that so often lands us in trouble of our own, by avoiding
losses (we think) but taking unjustified risks driven by emotion rather than
reasoning. Our common need to be certain
limits growth, learning, and personal development. Biasing the brain by needing to be right, we
are often led to be wrong. But this need
is systematic and knowable. Our overestimation of our own skills (the Dunning-Kruger
effect) can be readily disproven at the first encounter with a more skilled
individual or reviewing the corrected math-test answer sheet. Or by the beginning driver who discovers
quickly that he doesn’t have the experience needed to avoid a fender-bender. Most drivers will swear, however, that their
skills are above average.
A useful fiction
But this is a useful fiction. Overconfidence serves the purpose of
providing a reliable illusion of competence, one that allows people to function
under the guise that they are more skilled than they are. In the absence of
real-time testing, this can work. This fiction,
though, cannot serve its ego-ramping purpose when skill and knowledge are put
to work, and where results can be tested, as on the freeway for a driver new to
the road. It is a mental construct, a
personal vision that operates as a self-serving device. One that doesn’t always work that well.
Add to the issues of unskilled and unaware the unstable
nature of our memory of everything.
Vividness is no indication that a memory records actual events, to be
taken as evidence of what actually took place, or can act as proof of anything. Our recollections are a gallery of
impressions in a constant state of editing, enhancement, cutting, and
re-filming. Dreams are even more
fantastic, but we recognize them as personal visions with weak ties to outer
facts. But then we talk about following
our “dreams,” same word, as a working life
plan.
“The standard for decision-making is the courtroom, when it
comes to taking people’s liberty, reputation, resources, and even their life,
is not ‘certainty.’ It is ‘beyond a
reasonable doubt’. Judges even remind
jurors that it is impossible to prove or know anything with total certainty” (Trey
Gowdy, Start, Stay, or Leave, The Art of Decision-Making, (2023),
p. 58. “Waiting until you are certain is
going to be a long wait.”
The courtroom scenario is a key case study of testing
knowledge and the way we measure that knowledge. So are other critical life events: choosing a
career, a college, a living location, even a car, and especially a significant
other. All are big-ticket choices with long-term
consequences, and each requires weighting knowledge to decide which data points
are the most relevant to the decision.
But remember that the main driver of decision-making (the more important
the decision, the more powerful the drive) is the whole brain, which operates
on emotional affect. Rational thought is
just an irregular subset. Art, not science, rules the mind.
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