The Heat Pump She Suddenly Saw on Every Street

A customer in Hennessey told me, two weeks after I installed a new heat pump in her house, that she could not believe how many heat pumps were going in around town. She said she saw them everywhere. She named six driveways within a mile of her house where a new outdoor unit was sitting in the gravel.

I told her, kindly, that those units had been there for at least the last year. Most of them since before her install. What had changed was not the town. It was her.

There is a name for this. The linguist Arnold Zwicky coined the phrase frequency illusion in 2005, and recorded the older nickname for it, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It has two parts. First, selective attention: once you notice a thing, your attention grows a hook for it and starts catching instances you used to walk right past. Second, confirmation bias: you remember the times you noticed, and you forget all the times you did not.

It is the cognitive version of buying a red truck and then deciding the world is full of red trucks. The trucks were always there. You just did not see them as a category before. Now you do.

She had spent six weeks reading about heat pumps, asking me questions about heat pumps, watching me install one, and then living in a house with one. Heat pumps were a category in her head now, and the category had a hook. Every outdoor unit she drove past snagged on it. Six snags in a week felt like a wave.

I did not take the feeling away from her. She was right that heat pump installs have climbed over the last decade around here, and her count was about the right order of magnitude for what was actually out there. I just did not point out that the six units had not appeared in the last two weeks. The pattern she felt was real. It was not news about the town.

Core line: "New knowledge does not change the town. It changes the looker."

Give Us A Shout

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We're family-run and powered by 47+ years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
Book Online
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to today's deep dive. We are uh we're jumping into something today that I guarantee you've experienced.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Oh, absolutely. Everyone has.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Right. So our mission today is to unpack how acquiring new knowledge literally, physically alters what we see in the world around us.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

It changes your reality.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

It really does. And to ground this, we're looking at a fascinating reflective essay by Dave Hartzell. He is a master HVAC technician based in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, with uh 47 years of experience.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

47 years of just observing human behavior in people's living rooms and backyards.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Yeah. That's a lot of data. Okay, let's unpack this because, like I said, we have all experienced this. Think about, you know, the last time you bought a new car.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Oh, I know where you're going with this.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Right. You buy this specific, maybe slightly niche car, and the second you drive it off the lot, you feel like half the city went out and bought the exact same model that weekend.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Yeah. Or, you know, you decide to adopt a really specific dog breed, like uh a wire-haired pointing griffin. A very specific dog. Right. And you take it to the park, and suddenly you are just surrounded by them. You start wondering if like there was a two-for-one sale on griffins that you somehow missed.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

It is such a universal thing. So to anchor this, I want to jump straight into a story from Dave's essay. It's about a customer in Hennessy, Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

The heat pump story, this is a great one.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

It really is. So this customer gets a new heat pump installed. But she doesn't just buy it, she spends six whole weeks researching it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

She talks to installers, reads the manuals, watches the whole installation in her backyard, then she lives with it for two weeks.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

She basically took a crash course in HVAC.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Right. And then two weeks post-install, she excitedly calls Dave to report that heat pumps are just exploding in popularity in her neighborhood. She says she suddenly sees six brand new ones sitting in the gravel driveways on her street.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Which, you know, sounds like she's just being a very observant homeowner.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Except Dave knows the truth. He's worked that neighborhood for decades. He knows for a fact that those six heat pumps have been sitting in that exact gravel for over a year.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Way before she ever started researching hers.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Exactly. So what does this all mean? What is happening in this customer's brain? Because she isn't lying, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:16

No, she's not hallucinating at all. Those six heat pumps are physically real. The data points exist. Right. What's flawed is her inference. She is mistaking her own brand new awareness of the environment for a literal physical change in the town itself. Her brain essentially built a new category called heat pumps, and now her attention is just aggressively filtering the world to find them.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Wow. So it's like her brain took a neon highlighter to these units.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

And there's an actual scientific name for this, right? It's not just an H E A C phenomenon.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Oh yeah, Actadamia's been studying this for a while. A Stanford linguist named Arnold Zwicky actually coined the term frequency illusion on his blog back in 2005.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

The frequency illusion, got it.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

But you know, it's also commonly known as the Bader Meinhoff phenomenon.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Wait, the Bader Meinhof gang, like the 1970s militant group.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

The very same.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

How does a cognitive bias get named after an obscure German radical group?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

It's actually this hilarious piece of early internet history. Basically, a letter writer to a newspaper in 1994 mentioned that they had never in their entire life heard of the Bader Meinhof gang.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Which is fair, it's pretty obscure.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Right. But then they learned the name one day, and within 24 hours, they heard it referenced twice in completely unrelated places.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

So they assumed the universe was suddenly obsessed with these 1970s radicals.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Exactly, and the name just stuck. But Zwicky, the linguist, he broke this illusion down into a really mechanical two-part process.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Okay, lay it on me.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

What's fascinating here is that the first part is selective attention. And this is completely subconscious.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

So our brains are just actively filtering reality without us knowing.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

They have to. I mean, think about the sheer density of the world. If your brain tried to process every single leaf, every pebble, every car you walked past, it would completely short circuit.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Oh, totally. We'd be overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

So we evolve to filter out the meaningless static and only highlight novelty or danger. When you learn a new word or a new category, your brain creates a mental hook. A hook.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

I like that.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Yeah. And your attention just drops this new hook into the water, suddenly it starts catching all these things in the environment that you previously just walked right past.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

It catches the fish that were already swimming around you.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Exactly. But that is only half of the equation. The second part is confirmation bias.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Ah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Right. So once your new hook catches this thing a few times, you vividly remember the act of noticing it. It feels really significant.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

You get that little dopamine hit. It's like, uh-huh, there's another one.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Yeah, but what your brain conveniently forgets to tally are the thousands of times you did not notice the object.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

You only count the hits.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

You count the hits, you ignore the misses, and the combination of the two, the selective attention catching it and the confirmation bias remembering it, produces this incredibly intense feeling that the thing is suddenly everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Okay, I hear the Stanford linguist and the evolutionary psychology totally makes sense. But wait, isn't it possible the world IS changing and we're just finally catching on? How do we know we aren't just highly observant?

SPEAKER_00 5:21

That is the exact reason this is so tricky to navigate in real life, because sometimes trends really are real.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Right, like if a bunch of coffee shops open up, maybe there is an actual coffee boom.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Exactly. And Dave even notes in his essay that heat pumps are slowly increasing in his area. People are using them more for electrification and winter backup.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

So the customer in Hennessy wasn't completely wrong. The trend does exist.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

It exists, but the illusion warps the timeline and the scale. She feels a sudden explosive surge that happened over two weeks. But the reality is a slow, steady, decade-long increase.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

If we connect this to the bigger picture, it fundamentally distorts our sense of base rates.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Wait, let's pause there. By base rates you mean uh the actual statistical normal of how often something happens.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yes, exactly. The underlying probability. Say the base rate of a specific heat pump failing is one in a hundred. That's reality. But if you have a new hook for heat pump failures, you might notice three in a week.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

And suddenly you think the failure rate is one in ten.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Exactly. Your brain overwrites the statistical reality, the 97 perfectly working units you drove past with your newly hooked perception.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Wow. Okay, so if it's just noticing dogs at a park, that's a harmless quirk. But Dave works in a trade. This has to be a hazard, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:40

It is a huge hazard. For everyday customers, it's mostly an emotional hazard. They see five HVAC service trucks in their neighborhood and assume there's an epidemic of broken ACs.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

And Dave's just sitting there thinking, there were five trucks last month, too, you just weren't looking.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Right. Or a homeowner reads one article about refrigerant phase-outs and thinks the whole industry is collapsing. They obsess over one forum thread about a bad control board and completely panic.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

It's just a self-fulfilling loop of anxiety.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

It really is. But for the professionals, the tradesmen, the hazard is physical.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Here's where it gets really interesting. Because I mean, it's like WebMD syndrome. But for highly trained technicians holding wrenches, that is a perfect way to put it.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

You'd think an expert would be immune, but they might actually be more susceptible because they rely so heavily on pattern recognition.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

They trust their gut. And their gut has been right for 47 years.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Aaron Powell Right. But if an expert gets a bad hook, it corrupts that pattern recognition. Say a tech reads a trade magazine article about a very specific thermostatic expansion valve problem, a TXV failure.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Now they have a hook for TXV problems. They go out on their next five calls, and their attention is so primed, they subconsciously force the symptoms to fit that hook.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Oh wow. So every sluggish system suddenly looks like a TXV failure?

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Yes. They misdiagnose totally different issues just because that one failure is top of mind. Or they go to a refresher course on capacitor failures and suddenly they're out in the field replacing perfectly good capacitors.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Just because the hook is catching things, it shouldn't. That is wild.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Expertise doesn't make you immune. It almost weaponizes the bias because you have the technical vocabulary to justify your flawed observation.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

I mean, think about how broadly that applies. New parents do this all the time. You learn about one rare risk to toddlers, and suddenly your house looks like a death trap.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

The world didn't get more dangerous. Your attention just tuned into that threat.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

So if a master tech's brain can literally lie to him, how do we fix this? How do we combat an illusion that feels so incredibly real?

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Dave offers two really practical correctives: one for handling customers and one for handling yourself.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Let's start with the customers. Because you can't just tell a lady her eyes are broken and the heat pumps have been there for a year.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

No, Dave says directly contradicting them is the absolute worst thing you can do.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

I'm guessing people don't like being told their reality is fake.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Exactly. When you correct someone's lived experience with raw facts, you trigger massive cognitive dissonance. It causes the backfire effect, they get defensive and just double down.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

So what does Dave do?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

He honors the noticing. He validates their experience without confirming the false conclusion.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Okay, how does he phrase that?

SPEAKER_00 9:23

He tells them, new owner, new eyes.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Oh, I like that. New owner, new eyes.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Right. He validates that her intensive research and installation process retuned her perception. He frames it as a change in her, not a sudden change in the town.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

That is brilliant. It validates her intelligence. She did notice something, but gently steers her away from the illusion. It's like uh HVAC therapy.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

It really is.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

But what about the professional? When you're the one diagnosing the system or treating the patient and you feel that hook pulling you.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

For the professional, intuition has to be sidelined. You cannot trust your gut if it's recently been primed. The corrective is external verification.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Instruments over intuition.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Exactly. You measure, you pull out the basic checklists, you actively check the base rate data for your area, you have to cultivate the self-awareness to interrogate your own attention.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

You literally have to ask yourself, would I have suspected this specific failure if I hadn't just read an article about it?

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Keeping yourself honest about that invisible influence is the only way to break it. And Dave is incredibly humble about this in the essay.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Yeah, the ending of his story really got me. So he has this nice validating chat with the Hennessy customer, right? He gets in his truck, drives away, and passes three of those exact heat pumps she pointed out.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

And he realizes something amazing.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

He realizes he actually installed one of them back in 2019.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

He had driven past that specific gravel driveway dozens, maybe hundreds of times over the years, and never once noticed it. His brain just filtered it out as static.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

But on that day, because the customer had just named it and put that hook top of mind, Dave looks over and really sees it. The hook caught him too.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

This raises an important question, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Oh, absolutely. If a master tradesman who knows the psychology, who knows the base rates, who literally installed the machine himself, can still fall prey to this, how can any of us trust our unverified casual observations?

SPEAKER_01 11:21

It completely dismantles the whole seeing is believing thing. What you're seeing is just whatever your brain decided to highlight today based on whatever hook you just built.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

The world is infinitely denser than we can ever process.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

It's like walking through a massive pitch black warehouse with a tiny flashlight. Whatever the beam hits, you think that's all there is. But learning something new doesn't add anything to the room, it just shifts the flashlight an inch to the left.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Revealing a whole stack of boxes that were already there.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Exactly. And the applications for this are huge. If you're, you know, prepping for a big meeting or trying to understand a new field or just dealing with the daily fire hose of information online.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

It changes how you evaluate industry trends and how you react to your own anxieties.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

So the next time you learn a new concept or buy a new product and it feels like it's suddenly absolutely everywhere, take a breath. Remember Dave Hartzell driving past his own installation?

SPEAKER_00 12:14

The world didn't change overnight.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

No, it didn't. Your town is the same, your industry is the same, your attention just shifted the flashlight.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Which really leaves us with something to chew on. If learning just one new thing reveals this massive hidden layer of reality that was there all along, what else is sitting right in front of you?

SPEAKER_01 12:32

That's a good question.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

In your neighborhood, in your relationships, your career, what massive, obvious truths are completely invisible to you right now simply because you haven't built the hook for them yet? What are you walking blindly past today?