07 January 2016

Fallacy and Bias

Most of the times we think we are "sound" and better than others. We keep carrying this in our head - "if you take average score of intelligence, i am above average than most of the people". We fail to understand that all of us feel the same way. 

When you think you are better than your neighbor, your neighbor thinks he is better than you. If this is true, the average will be lower than individual scores. This clearly shows that we have fallacies and biases. The things we think are NOT what we think. Our concept of being neutral or unbiased is more biased towards us. This is a paradox. Ex: We often think that we are modest and in fact we "say" so - "i am modest".

Feel happy - everyone is wired that way. 

Our brain works and everyone's brain is wired for biases and fallacies. Our excellence lies in knowing these biases (making us counter productive) and putting checkpoints to bring some sense - an order from chaos. Only when we understand our biases and put some checkpoints, we will be making some sense.