Diagnosis biases

Diagnosis (from the Greek dia-gnôsis = through knowledge) is the identification of the nature of a situation, of a problem, through the interpretation of symptoms.

The diagnosis is sometimes confused with the prognosis, which is the hypothesis made about the way the situation is likely to evolve. The diagnosis therefore relates to the present and the prognosis to the future. In amenity arboriculture, assessment work is generally made up of these two pivotal threads: identification of the problem and then forecasting its evolution. Prognosis

as well as diagnosis. This double challenge leads to the major difficulty of predicting the future. The room for error in this exercise is obviously large – huge! However, an assessor has to make their recommendations after taking into account, or not, this margin of error and struggling, or not, to get closer

to the truth. But are we really capable of perceiving the truth about the present before we try to read the future? (...)