Seeing what’s there

“The first rule of good puzzling – see things as they are, and not as they seem.”

Elizabeth Haydon, The Floating Island.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for a trouble hacker is to see what’s there.  Sometimes when you are observing a system, you’ll only see what you expect to see.  If something happens that you don’t expect, it is easy to ignore it.  If you think something isn’t possible, you won’t check for it.  Your mental model influences your perception.

I hinted at this in my last post, when I described the two independent applications.  If you believed strongly that the two applications were in fact independent, you would have no reason to measure the performance of the two applications and check to see if the results were correlated – you would believe it to be impossible.  You might continue to believe it was impossible even if you were presented with evidence to the contrary.

This is a form of confirmation bias.  Confirmation bias is the tendency that we all have to interpret what we observe in a way that confirms our expectations.  And this is just one of a remarkably long list of other cognitive biases.   This is all just another way of saying that our mental models influence our ability to see what’s there.

That list of biases is pretty daunting.   If your own brain is conspiring against you, how can you tell that you aren’t seeing what’s there?  For a trouble hacker, there is one sure-fire sign:  you aren’t making progress in solving your problem.  When then happens, it is time to take another look at your mental model.

For more ideas on how to proceed when you aren’t making progress, we need to move to another point on the troublehackers’s triangle:  approach.