See I see myself do this a lot. I read something that appeals to who I believe I am and I grab it like a Recovering Alcoholic grabbing his Johnny Walker. I believe I do this, and am probably not alone in doing this because in some ways we have a yearning to validate who we are at least or even only to ourselves. It is that we sometimes grab these things just to say to ourselves we were not wrong. I know this is not a rational way of living. I hope to change this.

If this were the only case where I had this dispiriting result … perhaps I could treat it as an exception. But what I’ve found is every time I did a study like this … there was nobody home in terms of really wanting to know the result.
via Edward Tufte, Ron Howard, and government consulting