The New York Times published a great, short article, complete with quiz, about confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our innate preference to have our expectations, prejudices and assumptions confirmed. We can pay attention to confirming evidence and ignore contradicting evidence. The article measures this bias with a short quiz and argues that, when making a decision or solving a problem based on certain assumptions, we should try harder to disconfirm those assumptions to help avoid making big mistakes. Reminds me of the idea of pre-mortems to identify how things could go catastrophically wrong before making a major decision.
