if you see hoof prints, think horses

The Good, the Bad and the History

by Jodi Taylor · 21 Jun 2023 · 506pp · 132,373 words

short silence while I tried not to use my imagination, the chain pulled, the door opened and Markham said, ‘Most people hear hoofbeats and think horses. A few hear hoofbeats and think zebras. I hear hoofbeats and think Maxwell. Especially when they’re in the Gents’ lav.’ I ignored this. ‘What on earth were

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back

by Oliver Bullough · 5 Sep 2018 · 364pp · 112,681 words

. Any doctor will tell you that the guiding mantra for dealing with newly arrived patients is that common things are common. If you see hoof prints, think horses, not zebras; if you see an otherwise healthy man vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea, think gastroenteritis, not assassination ordered at the highest levels of a

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek · 15 Feb 2013

zoo animals I call the “big pretty animals”—the big predators such as the lions, tigers, and bears—pace. Ungulates, which are the hoofed animals—horses, cows, rhinoceroses, pigs, zebras, llamas—do stereotypies with their mouths. Most of the other animals, including primates and lab rats, develop movement stereotypies in the third category

Big Bang

by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 2004 · 492pp · 149,259 words

towards the correct one. Doctors often rely on Occam’s razor when diagnosing an illness, and medical students are advised: ‘When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.’ On the other hand, conspiracy theorists despise Occam’s razor, often rejecting a simple explanation in favour of a more convoluted and intriguing line

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems

by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield · 29 Mar 2020 · 1,380pp · 190,710 words

the advice that follows can help, but there’s no real substitute for understanding the system ahead of time (see Chapter 6). Distinguish horses from zebras When you hear hoofbeats, do you first think of horses, or zebras? Instructors sometime pose this question to medical students learning how to triage and diagnose diseases

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. It’s a reminder that most ailments are common—most hoofbeats are caused by horses, not zebras. You can imagine why this is helpful advice for a medical student: they don’t want to assume symptoms add up to a

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices)

by Steve McConnell · 8 Jun 2004 · 1,758pp · 342,766 words

1970s and 1980s, and so my best guess is that, today, an even higher percentage of errors are the programmers' fault. If you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras. The OS is probably not broken. And the database is probably just fine. — Andy Hunt Dave Thomas Clerical errors (typos) are a surprisingly

The Pragmatic Programmer

by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas · 19 Oct 1999 · 509pp · 92,141 words

starts blaming the system for a fault that is likely to be our own. Tip 26 "select" Isn't Broken Remember, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras. The OS is probably not broken. And the database is probably just fine. If you "changed only one thing" and the system stopped

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

by Benjamin Wallace · 18 Mar 2025 · 431pp · 116,274 words

of just about any argument, which made it effectively meaningless. Something I heard almost as often was the medical-diagnostic injunction “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” “Bitcoin is a very non-obvious idea, of the kind that takes years of crystallization, maybe an entire lifetime,” Grey wrote. “An idea born

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worth considering, in other words, had a critical flaw. My brain rang with buzzwords and clichés. Confirmation bias. Occam’s razor. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. I started seeing in my wife’s eyes a look I had tried to keep out of my own eyes during my first foray

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Nick wrote, on his death, “we will miss you Hal Finney.” Maybe everyone had made this too complicated. Occam’s razor. If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. If Hal was indeed Nakamoto, it would be the best possible outcome for Bitcoin enthusiasts. It would justify the sanctification of Satoshi. It would

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe

by William Poundstone · 3 Jun 2019 · 283pp · 81,376 words

barking is probable with a familiar visitor but improbable with a stranger. That is reason to favor the first possibility. 3. “When you hear hoofbeats look for horses, not zebras.” All else being equal, the more common explanation is to be preferred. Here’s another example: In the third grade I won a

How Doctors Think

by Jerome Groopman · 15 Jan 2007 · 292pp · 94,324 words

. "Common things are common" is another cliché that was drilled into me during my training. Another echoing maxim on rounds: "When you hear hoofbeats, think about horses, not zebras." Rachel Stein, trawling through the long list of causes of Pneumocystis pneumonia, found a zebra. A nutritional deficiency can cause impaired immune defense and

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it be?" is a key safeguard against these errors in thinking: premature closure, framing effect, availability from recent experience, the bias that the hoofbeats are horses and not zebras. Each cognitive error constrains the pursuit of answers, and correcting the error helps the doctor think of a test or procedure that he didn