5 ms·

I'm not sure which you're thinking of as the streetlight, the diagnosis or normality? Both are saying, "What you're after is here." It's up to oneself to follow

• quadrangle 9y ago
  The diagnosis. Normality puts bias mainly on the WHAT in "what you're after". The streetlight-effect is about the idea that you think you'll find what you're looking for by looking at the available information. The concern is: a complex human being with a ton of influences and factors cannot be diagnosed in ways we don't know how to diagnose. So, diagnoses represent the street-lit areas of knowledge, the stuff we understand somewhat. It's possible that the deeper insights come from places that we don't understand well and don't know how to diagnosis (so are like the dark areas where it's harder to find what you're looking for, but where the thing you're looking for might actually be). The point is: if a diagnosis really is the insight you need, then great. But it's not NECESSARILY. So, it's not true that getting the diagnosis is always worthwhile. There's a cost to spending time getting diagnosed for things and it might be at the expense of not spending time elsewhere. And in SOME cases, the diagnosis doesn't even approach the area where the real issues are. In short, the street-light-effect says: "if we figure out how to measure something, we can risk ignoring the enormous significance of all the things we don't know how to measure". The "streetlight effect" isn't about the light it's about the searcher being silly by looking only where things are already lit up even though that's sometimes not where the thing they are looking for is.