The limitation of human decision processing model and the failure of the schooling system

The human brain is structured to have essentially a single focus of conscious attention at a time, and to move rapidly from one focus to another. This ability to focus attention on perceived important things is one of the defining characteristics of human intelligence, but it is also one of the biggest limitation human have.

The big problem happens when the perceived important thing, the reality which people think is the truth turns out to be a lie in the world. They thought that they understand the truth, but the actual truth is not what they understand. Their internal map is simply differing tremendously from the actual territory, the actual terrain of the world.

However, the so called perception error is not only the sole limitation of the human decision processing system. As contrary to the failed schooling system proposed, a big mistake is not happen at the moment a person does a mistake. A big mistake happen at the very first moment a person is not focusing his attention to the proper things. Failure to focus attention to the required and important things in life is the starting point of any disaster, not the act of doing mistakes (which are punishable in our naïve schooling system).

Not able to perform the task correctly, or doing mistakes in any event is just a fact of life, as it is with the tendency to focus on the wrong thing. However, our beloved schooling system punishes mistakes; training all the students to focus on avoiding mistakes. This is seriously a context-limiting act. It is then no surprise that when a person being trained to focus not to make mistakes in the early part of their life, they began make disastrous big mistakes in the later part of their life, as they fail to focus their attention on the proper thing. They are trained all the while to focus only in avoiding mistakes and they stay focus on it, as in the most fundamental level, human brain is structured to have essentially a single focus of conscious attention at a time.

The problem never stop here, besides directing our focus to avoiding mistakes in life, our schooling system is also a very effective agent in shaping our attention to those context that are irrelevant to be successful. The entire syllabus, the program structure in schools and university, is aimed to train skillful employees to work for corporation and government. Instead of context exposure, the system emphasizes strongly on content expanding. The end result is a herd of rat running in a rat race (There is nothing wrong to be a rat, but the issue is, even you win in the race, you are still a rat).

As human is good in finding excuses to cover up their mistakes, they are extremely good in finding reasons to justify, and to rationalize their direction of focus. Many people stupidly defend their direction of focus by claiming that: “Well, there are just many different people with differ perspectives”, “there is no right or wrong answer”, and etc. As naïve as a person can go when they focus mainly on hard work and techniques when their basic, and the most fundamental strategy is totally wrong and fallible in the first place.

This problem is then further compounded when one would have responded instantly and changed one’s actions had someone repeatedly demanded attention and pointed out certain key facts (be it truth or not, as long as the reason touches a person emotionally and psychologically). Again, the limitation, single attention (focus) at a time, coupled with the nature where human cannot explain changes in their attention, often lead to disastrous outcome. Thus, in understanding errors that you have made in the past, it is a must to always consider what it was that you were not paying attention to. A person who focuses on what he had done wrong in his technique never truly learns from mistakes.

Nevertheless, these human limitations don’t really limit us. As a trader, we need to understand this nature of human being and would be able to profit from it. There are recently gradual shifts for social basis for attention, operating by word-of-mouth and facilitate by media transmission of ideas and tips, that generate attention focuses in the market across the country.

The herd could be start moving, should the attention is not shifted by any unforeseen circumstances, life would never be the same again.