Mistakes

I am reading the most interesting book entitled "Why We Make Mistakes, How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average." Okay, okay, the title is a little long. Still, the book is fascinating so far (I'm not very far into it).

The author talks about how our expectations shape how we see the world. For example, if we see a person and are told he is a truck driver and are asked to guess his weight, we guess his weight to be high. If we are told he is a dance, we guess his weight to be low.

The author claims that people who are happy make fewer mistakes. Happiness fosters well-organized thinking and flexible problem solving. However, optimism does not help because optimistic people are more often overconfident and overconfidence is a leading cause of human error.

Sometimes we just see what we want to see or expect to see. For an interesting example go to http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/sze_shepardTables/index.html".