In a chilling scene from 1949’s The Third Man, Harry Lime makes abstractions of human beings, reducing them to dots. How can people not be expendable when time and history and population are considered? It’s enough to make the blood run cold, and it’s the kind of thinking that has been employed to commit atrocities.

But a similar type of thinking can be used to do great good. If you want to judge people objectively, if you want to remove prejudice, if you want to make decisions based on facts and not emotions, if your aim is to seek truth and not be prone to the delusions of narrative, it might not be bad to selectively see people as dots. Not to reduce the humanity of others but to diminish our own faulty decision-making processes.