The Blind Spot Every Writer Has
And why clarity is harder than certainty
Most people think they see the world clearly. Writers, even more so. But the famous Selective Attention Test, created by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in 1999, suggests otherwise.
If you’ve never seen it — and you’re open to being surprised — watch this one-minute video before reading further: selective attention test.
In the study, participants were asked to watch a short clip of people passing basketballs and count how many times the ball changed hands. Halfway through, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the frame, stopped, beat its chest, and walked out.
When the researchers asked whether they noticed the unexpected event, nearly half said no.
Not because they weren’t paying attention. But because their attention was too narrow.
They didn’t see the gorilla because they weren’t looking for a gorilla.
To me, this experiment makes one thing unmistakably clear: perception isn’t neutral. It’s filtered, shaped, and narrowed by whatever we’ve already decided to look for.
The brain can’t process everything happening around us, so it filters reality based on:
what we already believe
what we hope is true
what we want to avoid
what feels familiar
what supports our current narrative
All of this happens before thought even begins.
And writers aren’t exempt from that.
How Writers Miss the Gorilla in Their Own Work
When writers talk about clarity, they usually imagine the clarity of an argument — the clean line, the sharpened claim, the stance that feels unshakeable. But often, the clarity that matters most in writing has very little to do with being right. It lives in the far more fragile terrain of noticing the assumptions we protect without realizing it.
We think we’re observing the world.
But most of the time, what we’re actually doing is reinforcing the world we already believe in.
This is the quiet machinery of confirmation bias — a powerful force shaping how we think, what we write, and what we allow ourselves to see.
It’s not that we’re uncurious. It’s that chasing certainty feels safer than exploring the unknown.
Every writer knows the feeling: you’re working on a draft, something in it feels off — a sentence that doesn’t sit right, a transition that strains, an argument that seems too convenient. But instead of investigating the discomfort, you defend your thinking. You adjust the wrong part. You protect an idea that, if you were honest, no longer holds.
And it makes sense. Confirmation bias is rooted in a hunger for coherence — for beliefs that don’t contradict one another, for an identity that feels consistent, for a worldview that keeps our personal narrative intact.
So we gravitate toward whatever confirms us:
the opinions we know our audience will agree with
the arguments we’ve rehearsed so often they feel like truth
the frames that won’t embarrass us intellectually or socially
Question your own stance, and the certainty leaks out of the prose. Readers notice it. Your reputation shakes. You no longer sound like someone who “knows.”
So we confuse confidence with clarity — and avoid going deeper simply because depth threatens our convictions.
I don’t pretend to have a method for eliminating confirmation bias. What I have is a practice — imperfect, ongoing, and often uncomfortable.
But part of that practice is learning to notice the forces that shape our attention before they shape our writing.
Algorithms Industrialize Confirmation Bias
If confirmation bias lived only inside the human mind, perhaps we could manage it better. But today, it is amplified by systems built to exploit attention.
Algorithms don’t reward exploration. They reward reinforcement.
They shape your worldview so that when you open your favorite social media app, it feels as if you’re surrounded by people who think exactly as you do.
They draw sharper lines between allies and enemies, tightening your sense of identity until disagreement feels like danger and agreement feels like validation.
They feed your emotional habits — serving outrage, certainty, or whatever keeps you hooked — even when it dulls your ability to think clearly.
A video that says “I might be wrong” will never outperform one that says “I’m right, and here’s why.” Nuance is pushed aside because nuance doesn’t scale. Contradiction is removed from the equation because contradiction doesn’t monetize.
Real curiosity — the kind that asks you to sit with uncertainty or follow a thought that feels uncomfortable — is not encouraged. It’s easier to keep you engaged in a numb state, flicking from video to video, barely noticing what you’re consuming, than to risk showing you something that might make you pause, reflect, and — worst of all for the platform — close the app.
The internet we inherited — the one that initially promised connection and a global library — has become an architecture designed to strengthen our existing beliefs. Agreement looks like truth. Extreme confidence like intelligence. And we end up in echo chambers that blind us from even considering other points of view.
That’s why I’ve become more critical of not just what I consume, but how the act of consuming shapes the depth of my thinking.
Because if there’s a silver lining, it’s this:
Algorithms may industrialize confirmation bias, but they don’t create it. They simply amplify what was already there.
Which means we’re not powerless. With deliberate effort, we can still widen the frame. The real work — the work no platform can do for us — happens in the private space where we’re willing to challenge our own convictions.
The Courage to Confront Yourself First
Most writers try to avoid the discomfort that comes from questioning their own thinking. But that discomfort is often the raw material of depth.
The writers I admire — James Baldwin, George Orwell, Mary Oliver — do something rare: they challenge their own beliefs first.
You can feel Baldwin thinking against himself on the page. And when your read Mary Oliver, you sense a mind watching itself — noticing its own interruptions, contradictions, and desires until something deeper comes into view.
Their writing isn’t a performance of certainty. You don’t see they trying hard to defend their arguments. They understand that life is complex, and that sometimes more than one truth can exist in the same space.
And while most writers focus on imitating their style, structure, or voice, what’s far more instructive is how they grapple with their own confirmation bias — how they stay open to the idea that they might be wrong.
As I’ve said before, I don’t have a formula or a “right way” to deal with confirmation bias. But when I’m writing, I try to approach it the way a scientist interrogates a hypothesis or a philosopher examines an assumption — with patience, humility, and the awareness that the mind is built to notice only what it already believes.
So when I feel too certain about an idea, I look for its counterargument. I try — even briefly — to set aside my judgment and consider that the opposite might also contain truth.
Sometimes I’ll even ask, “What would I write if I weren’t trying to be right?”
It’s a disarming question. It opens a wider field of vision. And even when I return to my original stance, I understand it more clearly because I’ve walked around it instead of standing inside it.
I also try to watch for the moments I grow defensive — when I begin overwriting a paragraph, layering five extra lines of justification, pretending I’m persuading the reader when I’m really trying to persuade myself. That defensiveness is a signal: something in my thinking needs attention.
None of this is easy. Staying with uncertainty, tolerating ambiguity, resisting the gravitational pull of algorithmic consensus — these are uncomfortable practices. But if we don’t create space for our thinking to evolve, what are we really offering ourselves, or our readers, when we sit down to write?
The longer I write, the more I realize that what survives the draft is rarely the argument I began with — but the person I grow into while writing it.
Writing, then, is a form of self-inquiry — a private space where I’m allowed to be wrong, and allowed to become someone new.