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If you don't actually live in Manhattan, you may dismiss it as a barren, concrete jungle. As a longtime resident, however, I can assure you that would be a mistake.
Beyond the less than delightful sightings of pigeons as big as chickens and rats as big as sumo wrestlers, New York offers many magical "Animal Planet" moments: sparrows nesting in the crossbar supports of traffic lights; ginkgo trees turning bright yellow and dropping their leaves all at once; and the cricket that hung out in the locust tree outside my window, all summer long.
I grew quite fond of that cricket.
I'd check-in with him every time I walked in or out the door and listened for him through the open window in the evening. So besotted was I that I even changed the alarm-clock sound on my phone to cricket chirps.
Big mistake. Here's why...
Last week, while on a business trip through the rural Midwest, I checked into a hotel that at first appeared totally normal. And it would have been, except for one thing. Deep in its ventilation system there lurked a ninja cricket.
Every time I'd fall asleep, the ninja cricket would start chirping and wake me up.
It wasn't a loud noise, but it didn't matter. Thanks to my cricket alarm clock, I had thoroughly conditioned myself over the summer to wake up at the sound of a raspy, insectoid chirp.
At that point, the only difference between me and Pavlov's dog was a tail. No matter how much I ordered my brain to file the ventilation cricket noise under "Ignore, Will Robinson" it insisted on filing it under "Wake up, you jackass!"
For sure, sleeping in 20-minute snatches made for a VERY long night. But just to prove that nothing is ever wasted (even a bad night's sleep), it did get me thinking: if it's this hard to sort out the signal from the noise with insects, we hardly stand a chance when it comes to figuring it out from the market news flow.
The confirmation bias is a well-known behavioral trope, one that has shipwrecked many a sell discipline. It states that we are wired to ignore information suggesting we are wrong and only pay attention to information that tells us we're right.
