Errors we make while thinking

            In life, we exchange thousands of ideas and opinions. Our brain is thinking constantly about many things, some of which we are not even aware of. Here I want to discuss some of the things I have learned about how we fail to recognize our own faults and rely on our intuition as well as offer some of my own observations along the way. 

            Why is it hard to find our own mistakes? and why is it easier to find other's mistakes? Because it is easier, and much more enjoyable to identify and label faults of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it. We lack in eyes that can look at ourselves because our eyes are evolved to look what is in front of us and that can lead to some serious errors in our intuition, decision-making, thinking and beliefs. 

            Most of us area healthy, and most of our judgments and actions are appropriate most of the time. As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are. 

How our intuitions and impressions are formed?

            When you are asked about what you are thinking about, you can normally answer. You believe you know what goes on in your mind, which often consists of one conscious thought leading in an orderly way to another. But that is not the only way the mind works, nor indeed is that the typical way. Most impressions  and thoughts arise in your conscious exprience without your knowing how they got there. You cannot trace how you came to know to the belief that there is a lamp on the desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation in your spouse's voice on the telephone, or how you managed to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind. 

Please assume that Steve was selected at random from a representative sample:
    

    An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: "Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail." Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?

            It is more appealing that Steve's personality is that of a stereotypical librarian. It strikes everyone immediately, but equally relevant statistical considerations are almost always ignored. Did it occur to you that there are more than 20 male farmers for each male librarian in the US? However, most people ignore the relevant statistical facts and relied exclusively on resemblance. Most people formed the biases that librarians are meek and tidy because they have to organize books in a library, however, that belief is formed without realizing which is why it creates an error in our judgment. These sort of reliance on the ease of memory search is called "Availability Heuristic". 

Consider another example, 

Consider the letter K, Is K more likely to appear as the first letter in a work OR as the third letter?

         It is much easier for our brain to come up with words that begin with a particular letter than to find words that have the same letter in the third position. This is true for every letter of the alphabet. Therefore, most people would intuitively answer that K is more likely to appear as the first, even though K occur more frequently in the third position. Here again, the reliance on a heuristic produces a predictable bias in judgments. 

 What does this mean? 

I hope these examples are enough to convince how our brain forms an opinion or beliefs without being aware of it and relies more on these formed intuitions when we speak or think. Though these are simple questions and yes, when asking in the context of mind thoughts, people tend to question, but it is so much easier to forget to do that in our day to day lives. 

            I come across many people, including myself, where I made a bold claim about something when presented an idea or opinion without considering facts and totally relied on my past experiences. 
For example, when I started programming, everyone was talking about Git and how important it is. I didn't have much experience back then, for little that I had tried, it was cumbersome and tedious to get started on Git. So I used to think that "Github is useless", which is in fact not the case. After I got my first job, I realized how powerful and important Github is when it comes to managing code. 

            Similarly, I have a friend who is always trying to get some ideas for a startup or application. In this particular instance, He told me that he is interested in creating an application that can show inner maps of buildings. While the idea is good, He believed that this idea hasn't been done before and very great one, however, in reality that idea was really popular and was worked on by Google and many other companies at the time. So in our lives, we may think that our opinions are never wrong because without facts and statistical data, however little we know, seems more valid and true than it actually is. 

            If you expand this idea and implement in our daily lives, I think we can easily spot our own faults and mistakes when we speak. It is extremely easy to ignore or validate the opinions we have, so as a person, whenever we are listening someone, we should always try to be impartial and avoid making a claim without facts. Self analyzing what we speak and listen, will help ourselves to improve and see our mistakes in life, and that is the best way to grow in life.