[Tim Y]

Another, more subtle aspect of DECISIONS, are the inborn biases that dictate and bias truly OBJECTIVE evaluations of the same data by any two individuals. These are subtle, below consciousness and one must guard against them all the time.

One only has to read BLINK ( M. Gladwell) Thinking Fast Thinking Slow (Khaneman, Nobel prize winning economist), The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow) or Strangers to Ourselves (Wilson) or The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to witness the subtle, yet domineering internal psychological blocks to our open decision making process.

One of the MOST egregious mistakes we all make to some degree is the Narrative Fallacy: weaving stories of cause and effect over FACTLESS observations and then accepting them a true when we just make up a story to fit what we THOUGHT happened.

A good one in this last category just happened last week. I was told that ARROGATE "exploded" by Chrome to which it noted that a gain of 3 lengths is merely a gain of 3 lenghts and showed several similar closing moves, just in claiming races. Interesting how the same move in a claiming race garners far less value than the same amount of ground made up in a grade one race. Same effect, but psychologically bolstered out of reality by the emotion of the situation at hand.