Believing is Seeing

Any who read this blog regularly—all three of you—will note that I leave a lot of simple editing errors in posts, that sometimes get fixed later-on. It turns out that there is an explanation for such. I, and others like me, simply don't see these kinds of errors in text, particularly on the day I write and/or edit. This is one of the small morsels of insight I gleaned from Taleb's The Black Swan that fits nicely within what organizational psychologist Karl Weick calls "Believing is seeing!" Taleb captures it this way, when discussing his narrative fallacy which we dealt with recently. Taleb:

To see an illustration of our biological dependence on a story, consider the following experiment. Frist, read this:

A BIRD IN THE
THE HAND IS WORTH
TWO IN THE BUSH

Do you see anything unusual? Try again. …
Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. …

The scary part for me is that Taleb pigeonholes me among 'believers', those who are desperately, perchance intuitively trying to fit things into storylines or theories/models. I guess I'll plead guilty. But I do try to practice at "suspending judgment" and being open to alternative theory/method. Sometimes I even change my methodological stripes.

In my study of economics, for example, I have moved—through the years— from neoclassical, to neoAustrian (or maybe just Austrian), to heterodox (either as an ecological economics practitioner, or as a post-Keynesian financial economics practitioner (see, e.g. my Econ Dreams—Nightmares blog)). And I'm still searching.

So bear with me and my too many small (and larger) errors of syntax, calculation, method, theory, philosophy.

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PS.. In the "experiment" above, the word the is written twice.