There's a strange irony at the heart of medical training: the better a clinician becomes at pattern recognition, the more vulnerable they become to a particular kind of error. Atul Gawande documented this in 'Complications' — expert physicians, precisely because they've seen thousands of cases, can lock onto a diagnosis early and unconsciously filter out contradicting evidence. The Pragmatist philosopher William James called this the 'psychologist's fallacy' — mistaking your mental map for the territory itself. What's remarkable is that both traditions offer the same corrective: stay in deliberate contact with the particular. James argued that truth isn't a fixed possession but something we *earn* through ongoing engagement with specific, concrete facts. For a clinician, this means treating each patient not as a confirmed hypothesis but as an open question — even when the pattern feels obvious. Today, notice where expertise is making you less curious rather than more.

Where in your work has confidence in a pattern caused you to stop looking for disconfirming evidence?

Drawing from Pragmatism — William James