This was also the part I found most interesting. Over the past several months, I've been putting an increasing level of thought into how people reach conclusio

This was also the part I found most interesting. Over the past several months, I've been putting an increasing level of thought into how people reach conclusions and investigate technical problems, and looking at things like confirmation bias, and I see it happen in myself and others. The best example I have, is a vendor I work with had an outage in their platform, and we spent weeks going through the data, where the vendor jumped to a conclusion about the cause of the outage, even though it poorly or in no way explained the data we had compiled. No matter how hard I tried, I was not able to convince this vendor that the conclusion they reached was incorrect, every piece of evidence, was manipulated in a way to explain their theory. That is until they developed the fix, applied it, and had another outage occur after they thought they fixed it. It troubles me, to know that we wasted so much effort, due to these biases. While not 100% related, one story I like to remind myself of to try and disrupt my own biases, goes something along the lines of: - A little girl was helping her mom make banana bread one day, and asks her mom, why do you cut the ends off before you serve it. - The mom replies, I don't know, that's the way my mom always made it. - Next they ask the girls grand mother, why did you cut the ends off the bread - She replies, I don't know that's the way I always made it. - They manage to ask the great grand mother, why did you cut the ends off... - The response was, my serving plate was too small, so I used to cut the ends off so it would fit on the plate. If anyone knows the attribution for that story, it would be great, I'm unable to find it so my recollection is probably wrong. However, I still really like this story, as I use it as a way to remind myself and others, that we need to be ready to question everything, when it comes to understanding a problem. It doesn't mean that we can afford to question every bias, but it does mean that we need to gain enough evidence to corroborate any theory that may come up, or if necessary, invalidate it. Where I work, I believe it's something we need to spend greater effort on, is questioning our biases and make sure we're reaching the right conclusions.