The fallacy of obviousness - it is obvious because we want it to be

 

“What people are looking for – rather than what people are merely looking at – determines what is obvious.” -Teppo Felin

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” - Warren Buffett  

One of the more interesting ideas I have come across is "the fallacy of obviousness" from Teppo Felin

(@teppofelin) is a professor of strategy at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. 

Many behavioral biases start with the problem of observation. We see what we want to see not what may be in front of us. we are not blind to the obvious because we only see what we want to see as obvious. There is no obvious. There is only finding what we want to find. Our mind works on focusing and excluding, not just observing. Our mind is a qualifier which wants to hold specific ideas and the fact that support our views. Hence, we only see what we want to see and miss the rest. A foundational problem is trying to see or look for more than what we want yet looking for more open us to more noise and perhaps even less clarity. This is not just a human problem. A computer or AI problem is that it looks for what it has been trained to look for.  Even unsupervised learning requires an algorithm to find connections. 

The challenge for investing to look beyond the obvious or change what is obvious so we avoid the problem of just looking for the facts that support our current thinking.