So, I've been thinking about my conundrum for a while now when Patri posted thisHere is my response, I'd appreciate your feedback as well since this is an area I'm working on
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Is Truth the Issue?infopracticalMarch 19 2009, 04:11:47 UTC
Deciding how much to trust data is a truly difficult task. My bet is that you're doing better than most people. The "First Impression Problem" is deep -- people take an initial data point and get set in stone on their perspectives.
Of course, one data point can be an outlier or even just "a little off center". It is appropriate to hold on to a data point and seek more data so long as the data seeking process is not too costly. In other words, it is often appropriate to allow your judgment to evolve. But when time and resources are particularly precious, then it might be more appropriate to make a judgment and move on. Making this judgment is not a pronouncement of bit-T "Truth", but rather a strategy for optimizing your own behavior. If data points present themselves cost-free, you can always update your views.
Great point. I'd like to add that allowing judgement to evolve, and making a time/resource-sensitive judgement in the moment, are not actually strategies inherently at odds with eachother. Feedback is essential to learning.
What do you mean by allowing judgment to evolve? Do you mean the process by which we make judgment or just let the result of the judgment to change according to data?
There's a time and a place for when bringing something up is useful, or not; if I talked about all the facets of truths I saw I'd never shut up (and believe me, when I'm tired/off but opened floodgates anyway, it's sometimes gotten pretty messy
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Are impressions arbitrary or semi-arbitrary? Are they lazy shortcuts that leads us to a conclusion or cost-effective ways of dealing with complicated entities we don't have time and energy to learn?
Totally! Though throwing away truly meaningful data you already have isn't particularly good. It sounds like D's conundrum is more about figuring out how to analyze/integrate, or what to do with, her data once she has it.
Although I agree with the first comment to this post, I'd like to point out that there is a tendency for most of us to remember the times we should have trusted our gut reactions or early evidence and did not (because someone doesn't work out) and forget about the times when our initial reactions were negative, but things worked out adequately. I think many of us often even forget that we had initially bad reactions to someone when things work out.
Yar. This is one of my problems with Landmark -- there is always a more positive perspective to take, but this can ignore the real truth of the situation. How do you decide how much weight to give the facts from the past (and the stories that are the likely interpretations) vs an optimistic possibility for the future
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Of course, one data point can be an outlier or even just "a little off center". It is appropriate to hold on to a data point and seek more data so long as the data seeking process is not too costly. In other words, it is often appropriate to allow your judgment to evolve. But when time and resources are particularly precious, then it might be more appropriate to make a judgment and move on. Making this judgment is not a pronouncement of bit-T "Truth", but rather a strategy for optimizing your own behavior. If data points present themselves cost-free, you can always update your views.
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process by which we make judgment or just let the result of the judgment
to change according to data?
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that leads us to a conclusion or cost-effective ways of dealing with
complicated entities we don't have time and energy to learn?
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