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Which surgery do you suggest?

Which surgery do you suggest?

Imagine someone is suffering from a critical disease.
You accompany the patient to the hospital and meet up a doctor who suggests an immediate operation.
You need to help the patient decide to undergo surgery based on following statistics on the operation's success.
Operation A - 100 patients who have this operation A, ninety are alive after five years.
Operation B - 100 patients who have this operation B, ten are dead after five years.
The patient needs to go for this surgery.
Which operation will you suggest to the patient?
Photo Adaptation/Flickr/armymedicine
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The mistakes we make in our everyday life

• We are hardwired to make these mistakes • Few biases are simply evolutionary • These errors affect all of us including the bright ones • Experience is just not enough to overcome • but expertise is required to recognize and overcome

Few of biases as below · Anchoring - When an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information during decision making · Fixed pie - When we assume that our interests conflict with the other party's interests and we play adversarial · Framing - When we decide on our options differently when the options are presented with positive or negative connotations · Vividness – When we pay attention to strong features at the expense of less, that could be more impactful · Over confidence – When our subjective confidence is greater than the objective accuracy · Escalation – When initial decision is followed up with an irrational decision to justify the initial decision

Few ways to mitigate these biases are · Learn to recognize the bias · Use slow, effortful and logical thinking (System 2) · Avoid fast, automatic and effortless thinking (System 1) · Avoid negotiations which are thrust upon when not ready · Learn through use of stories, examples, exercises · Bring an outsider perspective