My World of WYSIATI

What You See Is All There Is — not only a cognitive bias but a basis of our new reality

What You See Is All There Is — one of the cognitive biases explained in Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” It is not only the bias but one of the phenomena defining our world. Look at my day. I wake up, and during breakfast, I read something — an article on Medium maybe. Don’t take me wrong — but I don’t trust you guys. If I find some information that contradicts my view on the world, I’ll verify it. How? Like everyone, I’ll google it, and I’ll focus on sources I trust — do my cross-examination.

What is wrong with it? If I can’t find anything on the phenomenon — it does not exist. If I find something trustworthy — then it has been verified. What You See Is All There Is. Despite all my efforts, my brain will finish the picture for me without me knowing, and that’s what Daniel Kahneman is talking about when describing this bias. I finish my breakfast and complete the reading. I feel a bit proud of myself — I’ve not just trusted the story, I’ve researched it (for 30 seconds).

I go to work. What do they want now? Faster decisions, shorter turnaround. Lean processes. Zero inventory. JIT (Just-In-Time Manufacturing, the utopia of lean processes) means What You See Is All There Is. Don’t take me wrong. We do things faster when processes are Lean. But there is not even the faintest moment to look at a bigger picture. We need your decisions here and now. One has to block meetings with himself or herself to focus on an analytical task for an hour. The new generation processes work in a way that having to take time for analysis is a luxury. Making a decision based on things on the table is the default behavior. WYSIATI.

I talk to people, and I like to think of myself as a person with an analytical mindset. Tell this to Karl Popper or Francis Bacon. Being analytical now means spending half a minute before making a decision and checking a few sources to verify your inputs. If this is not on our corporate network and not on google — it does not exist. What You See Is All There Is. What you don’t see is not there at all.

Businesses make decisions this way. I hear it a lot in business discussions. Let’s put this on the table. Right. Because something not on the table is not here at all. Not a part of our negotiation, not a part of our discussion. Not on the table. Does not exist.

In 2012 Knight Capital Group lost $440 million because of a trading glitch and was acquired by a rival. Someone deployed a wrong version of the software which made a wrong, but swift and fully automated decision to buy stock — massive amounts of capital. Decisions to sell billions can be made faster then you read this, and algorithms to perform such trading are developed in a lean way. What You See Is All There Is. The algorithm worked well on staging with train data — let’s get it done and make some more alpha.

The whole subprime mortgage crisis is a crisis of WYSIATI. Subprime mortgages looked well financially and were likely to get merged into more significant portfolios. And you remember — analysts looked at those portfolios, used their algorithms developed with lean processes, and the good ones took half a minute to research it on top. What You See Is All There Is. It has been an excellent decision to invest, and everyone just did it.

I come back home, I play with a kid, or I study. What do I pick on Coursera? Something I can plug and play. Something I can install on my laptop in half an hour and feed with real data. It is good that all data is just sitting out there available to be used. I can gather data from Wikipedia using a crawler and make my classification algorithm to find some insights. I can connect to UCSC and download a reference human genome to my locally installed software in a matter of minutes. That’s sometimes called Data Science and Genomic Technology. Tons of insights build on something sitting out there. They are based on things available fast. Here and now in our flat worlds became bigger, then it used to be even ten years ago. Indeed, you can google something which took years to consolidate. But is it everything? Do you believe that What You See Is All There Is?

When I study — I want to understand and try things fast. Not only because the world requires me to be lean, but because things I cannot try or see — they don’t exist. What You See Is All There Is. What if something strange happens that does not fit this reality? Well, my mind will apply this fascinating phenomenon just to ignore that. Have you watched any sci-fi thrillers? Then you know it.

I have dinner and read some news afterward. I do not trust this news, and I google it again. Well, another half a minute of nice cross-examination. Then I watch an episode of a show — well, that’s the only moment of a day when this principle does no harm, and it helps me relax. I don’t need to know if dragons are for real. They are not. But my brain plays its trick. What I See Is All There Is. Dragons are real, and I’m there. The whole beautiful universe of imagination is built on the same thing I’ve been complaining about.

Take your time. Think of what you read. Think of what you see. Think of what they say. What You See Is Not All There Is. WYSINATI.