When a diagnosis resists you, the temptation is to sharpen the question — run another test, consult another specialist, narrow the search. But the 11th-century Persian physician and philosopher Avicenna argued in the *Canon of Medicine* that the physician's greatest error is not ignorance but premature closure: the mind that has already decided what it is looking for will find exactly that, and nothing else. Modern cognitive scientists would later name this 'anchoring bias,' but Avicenna framed it philosophically: certainty is a kind of blindness that masquerades as competence. The corrective he prescribed wasn't more data — it was a deliberate return to what he called 'ordered doubt,' a structured practice of re-examining the case as if the first impression had never been formed. Today, before you settle on any explanation — clinical, administrative, or interpersonal — try holding your leading hypothesis loosely for sixty seconds longer than feels necessary. That small gap is where the actual diagnosis often lives.

Name a case, situation, or belief where your explanation arrived before your evidence was complete — and stayed.

Drawing from Islamic Peripatetic Philosophy / Philosophy of Medicine — Avicenna (Ibn Sina)