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Which surgery do you suggest?

Which surgery do you suggest?

Imagine someone is suffering from a critical disease.
You accompany the patient to the hospital and meet up a doctor who suggests an immediate operation.
You need to help the patient decide to undergo surgery based on following statistics on the operation's success.
Operation A - 100 patients who have this operation A, ninety are alive after five years.
Operation B - 100 patients who have this operation B, ten are dead after five years.
The patient needs to go for this surgery.
Which operation will you suggest to the patient?
Photo Adaptation/Flickr/armymedicine
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The mistakes we make in our everyday life

We human beings engage in thinking and decision making in our daily life. It is our ability to solve problems and choose the best course of action, which leads to better outcomes. But we also make systematic errors when we think and at times we don’t even realize. We fail to think clearly because of our emotions such as anger or fear and this leads to wrong decision making as well as avoidable harm.

These systematic errors are known as biases. We can learn, understand to notice these biases within us and around us. Once we know, then we can also take action to avoid these biases, prejudices and beliefs and act to avoid the harm. Biases are systematic and predictable errors we make.