By Tomasz Tunguz, February 23, 2016
This post has been viewed 2,761 times.
These blindspots confuse us. And when prompted with data that confounds our expectations, only 10% of the time will we trust the data rather than our intuition, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Decisive Actions: How Businesses Make Decisions report. 57% of the time, survey respondents would reanalyze the data to ensure no issue with data collection or math errors.
Our ultimate goal with data is to defeat bias. In the “Philosophy of Data,” New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks articulates the two ways data exposes when our hunches are just plain wrong.
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More than simply explain what has occurred in the past and why, data is a powerful tool to expose our biases and point the way to the right decision, especially when the data contradicts our instincts. If 1000 PhDs can be fooled by a counterintuitive probability problem, no one is safe from bias.
