Life and Death of a Pot
An interesting example of “Confirmation Bias”
Our tragedy is that we only accept or believe what we want to accept or believe. In other words we are often suffering from myopia or confirmation bias and thus unable to see past the end of our very noses. The main problem with people suffering from confirmation-bias is that they seek out or believe information that only confirms their existing beliefs and ignore or discredit information that doesn’t seem to support or favour them.
In short, they behave like Oedipus, a mythical Greek king of Thebes and a tragic hero in Greek mythology (that was written in the form of a play by ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles), who had sight but no insights and thus was unable to see the truth that was so obvious to him. He fell into misfortune because of an error in judgment (due to being hubristic, hasty and selfish) that resulted in unintentional killing of his father (king Laios or Laius) through his own hands (by unknowingly striking him with his staff after Laius struck Oedipus in anger) and self-inflicted punishment for making mistakes by not being able to see the truth and light anymore. Although he is also shown to have the qualities, such as humanity, shrewdness, determination but his “outsized sense of self-importance” makes him a tragic hero.
