Making Sense vs. Being Right

• People tend to care about something making sense more than they care about something being right.
• It’s why we’re bad at forecasting and easily persuaded and why the economy is driven by stories.
• It’s not your fault. The world is complicated and everyone’s trying to fit what’s going on into the context of their own life experiences.

Two factors cause the gap between perception and reality.

The most important events – things that are counterintuitive, disruptive, and swayed by emotion more than calculation – tend to share a few traits that make gathering a good sample of data hard:

• They’re rare. 
• The data is hard to collect.
• More data intuitively feels better.

This is a big problem and there is no solution to it other than giving yourself room for error in not only in your actions but your beliefs.