Our lives are filled with assumptions.
If an action has had the same outcome a hundred times, we expect it to have the same on the hundred and first.
We call this experience.
Assumptions play an important role in our lives. They are short-cuts in thought that save us time. In niches, they are one of the differences between an expert and a lay person: they are what tell a plumber the source of a leak after looking under your sink, tell a doctor the source of your ailment just by the bumps on your skin, and they tell a network engineer the root cause of a network outage in glance through equipment logs.
Assumptions are important, but they all have the same, obvious, flaw.
They’re not always right; but that isn’t the problem.
The problem is when we aren’t aware of the assumptions we make; because if we’re not aware, we don’t catch when we are wrong.
I can live with being flawed; but I want to know the kind of flawed monster I am.