"Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic"
About this Quote
De Bono is politely dragging the debate-club fantasy of human reason: that we bungle conclusions because we didn’t syllogize hard enough. His jab is that the bigger failure happens earlier, upstream of logic, in what we notice, what we ignore, and what we prematurely label as “the situation.” You can run flawless logic on a bad snapshot and still end up confidently wrong.
The intent is classic de Bono: redirect attention from argument to attention. Logic is a tool for moving within a frame; perception decides the frame. The subtext is almost moral in its implication: people hide behind “rationality” to avoid admitting they’re selectively seeing. It’s easier to call someone illogical than to confront that your own categories are stale, your assumptions invisible, your information diet narrow.
Context matters: de Bono built a career on lateral thinking and the idea that cognition isn’t just deduction, it’s patterning. In practice, that means our minds optimize for speed and coherence, not truth. We mistake familiar patterns for accurate ones; we treat first impressions as data; we confuse salience (what stands out) with significance (what matters). The line also anticipates today’s attention economy, where perception is engineered: feeds, headlines, and metrics don’t typically break your logic, they curate your inputs and prime your interpretations.
It works because it shifts blame from “bad reasoning” to a more uncomfortable vulnerability: reality is filtered before it’s ever argued with. The fix isn’t just better logic. It’s better seeing.
The intent is classic de Bono: redirect attention from argument to attention. Logic is a tool for moving within a frame; perception decides the frame. The subtext is almost moral in its implication: people hide behind “rationality” to avoid admitting they’re selectively seeing. It’s easier to call someone illogical than to confront that your own categories are stale, your assumptions invisible, your information diet narrow.
Context matters: de Bono built a career on lateral thinking and the idea that cognition isn’t just deduction, it’s patterning. In practice, that means our minds optimize for speed and coherence, not truth. We mistake familiar patterns for accurate ones; we treat first impressions as data; we confuse salience (what stands out) with significance (what matters). The line also anticipates today’s attention economy, where perception is engineered: feeds, headlines, and metrics don’t typically break your logic, they curate your inputs and prime your interpretations.
It works because it shifts blame from “bad reasoning” to a more uncomfortable vulnerability: reality is filtered before it’s ever argued with. The fix isn’t just better logic. It’s better seeing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|
More Quotes by Edward
Add to List
