Wisdom in diagnosis, then, involves not only deep knowledge about human biology and an understanding of the array of diseases that plague humankind but also knowledge and understanding about how the mind works in coming to conclusions. Discerning when these biases are operating in our minds is called metacognition, the ability to think about our thinking. The attribute of humility is embodied in the concept of metacognition; we recognize that our minds are imperfect, that there are limits to the validity of our assumptions, that we are subject to biases, and that therefore we must have the sharp sense to doubt our judgments and question whether we considered everything that should have been considered.

From “The Best Medicine” at In Character, by Harvard’s Jerome Groopman, M.D.

The essay focuses on the effects of cognitive bias in medical diagnoses (and why they’re bad). The practice of monitoring biases is important for any type of decision. It’s an essential aspect of open/conceptual’s “meta factors” discipline.

Designers and marketers (not to mention politicos and entertainers) have become adept at manipulating these biases in consumers and users, but I wonder how many are aware of how their own biases may affect the design process itself — or simply the question of which problem to solve…

Here is the book the launched the “heuristics & biases” paradigm and here is a list of cognitive biases that have probably influenced things you’re working on right now.

If you want some practice, try joining the discussion at Less Wrong for a few days.

Related posts:

1. Meta Factors

In the process of summarizing my last post, Jeff Jarvis suggested I was “searching for a metaphor for what I’ve been calling beta-think.” He’s exactly right — though I wasn’t aware of it when I started writing — so I’m going to take that up with a bit more brevity and focus.

The search for a “beta-think” metaphor builds on a more fundamental one I worked out last year, when I proposed that relevance will become the key to a new theory of human motivation:

I may not have realized it at the time, but my intellectual project was being supplied by metaphors from the internet — and more importantly, from the social web, or “Web 2.0.” The old dichotomies were inspired and perpetuated by mechanical metaphors — collisions and friction, turning gears, pressurized steam, etc — so it’s perhaps inevitable for us to conceive a new theory (or at least attitude, or vocabulary) of human nature using the marquee technology of our age. [...]

So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation from domination and control to connectedness and meaning…

Google’s search engine acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.

So what’s the improved metaphor for beta-think? I don’t know yet — but I do know how we can work it out: by simply doing and making things in beta: prototyping and adapting and reiterating, etc.

By developing more open organizations and processes — based on the idea that people are motivated by relevance, not just money, power, and prestige — we’ll get progressively better metaphors and models for imagining how the mind works; as we get a better understanding of how the mind works, we can develop more effective organizations and processes… and so on, heuristically & recursively.

Related posts:

1. The Will to Relevance