Word: problem
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...When I'm looking for something I've dropped on the carpet, I have a bit of a problem...
...first days, Drexler got on the horn and asked for whoever was in charge of fit to come to his office, a corner blocked off by cubicle partitions. Twenty-five people showed up--with 25 ideas about how garments should hang. "Now I understand the problem," he said. As he recently explained, "In any business, there has to be a vision...
...times you'll see a performer just hit the beats and get out," says McKay, a former head writer on the show. "Will would drag it out and make it longer, like, 'No, no, you're going to be listening to this for a while yet.' He has no problem with beats of silence and awkwardness. He loves that stuff...
Groopman describes this kind of "attribution error" in the case of a nervous young woman who kept losing weight even when prescribed a high-calorie diet. Her doctors, convinced that she was lying about her food intake, suspected anorexia or bulimia, but her problem, diagnosed after years of ill health, turned out to be celiac disease--an allergy to wheat. Had the patient been male or older or less anxious, the doctors might have got it right in the first place...
Physicians typically prefer to act even when in doubt about the nature of the problem. And yet this kind of "commission bias" can lead to all sorts of new problems if the treatment turns out to be incorrect...