Why Highly Intelligent People Still Make Blind Decisions

Analytical capability is a lens. Like any lens, it resolves detail by excluding the periphery. The stronger the lens, the more confident the exclusion.

This is why serious mistakes are rarely made by people who lacked information. They are made by people who had a great deal of it, arranged coherently, and therefore stopped asking what the arrangement left out.

Coherence feels like truth. It is not the same thing. A picture can be internally consistent and still be missing the element that decides the outcome.

The discipline is to hold the analysis fully — and then deliberately step outside it, once, before committing.