&gt;then you have some sort of cognitive dissonance to counteract.<p>Well, you have to deal with the reality of how humans think. That cognitive dissonance is called the human condition. It is impossible to live life if one were to not have any biases or gut instinct. You&#x27;d have 1000 football games between two teams just to eliminate the different variables in order to determine which team was better. You&#x27;d have to visit a restaurant that served you shitty food, again and again till you made sure that it wasn&#x27;t just a one-off, You&#x27;d have to allow a person to run a company into the ground multiple times just to make sure the previous failures were not the result of poor judgement, and so on. Chance and probablity rule our lives.<p>Also, your brakes example is unsatisfactory. When people use brakes they get an immediate feedback which lets them know if they&#x27;re working adequately. And even so, people are more likely to believe a mechanic when it comes to brakes precisely because they could die if they get it wrong.