#which are like. not completely invalid but also built on assumptions that we get certain social rules around things we don't

[faithfromanewperspective]

coming to the realisation that we generally don't know what to do as a society when artists share hard experiences in their songs. the fans being a little parasocial and dramatic about it? that's how fandom works when you see yourself in it like. a lot a lot. the pity? ends up coming usually from new fans who see the fans' reaction from the outside, know nothing about the artist to be able to place it in their life and what they've been through (and are thus caught off guard) and react to their first encounter with said art. no one actually wants to be pitied, they just want to be honest. and we're so used to a society of faking being fine that honesty, even about completely normal (and yet stigmatised) things sounds dramatic. feels uncomfortable. does this sound familiar? parents when their child tells them what they're going through either going 'it's not that bad everyone experiences that' or I Must Fix It And Fix It ASAP.

like I know it feels uncomfortable at first. but you can just sit there and be like 'cool, this person went through something that vaguely inspired them to make this emotional art. something that surely less talented and creative people go through every day.' and then you can see the reaction of some fans and be like 'they either relate or they care about this artist really dramatically' and decide if this is something you want to get in on or just let it by and go find the kind of entertainment you enjoy. go through the world being kind to others and yourself because there are people out there going through things you don't need to know about and sometimes the best thing you can do is care for yourself so you don't get bitter.

and i'm not here to tell you there isn't a place and time for criticisms, but when you get close to policing how dramatically someone expresses their emotions and how publicly they share the processing of their experience? that's when it's time to look at yourself. go 'is it really harming anyone or might it possibly be helping?' and when you do, remember, there's no 'taking away from real victims' if it's art made for real victims or whoever wants to to insert their own story into it. which most art is!! and 99% of the time when people make it about something in the artist's life? that's the fandom. fans get a bit parasocial! they get an attachment to the artist and end up knowing a lot of their personal details. which no one else has to.

but invalidating people's experience doesn't actually help anyone. you probably had it happen to you before. it probably helped you put together a framework in your head of what you are and aren't allowed to feel upset over. and i ask you: does this framework help you? or does it just leave you frustrated? you can throw it away you know. of course you don't have to be emotional publicly but you can validate what actually hurts you for yourself. you'll feel freer and more equipped to deal with trauma and handle other people's emotions when you do.

and as for whatever someone else might be going through or not? you don't need to validate it either, to take the authority to do either of those things. it's likely you'll never know all the details unless it's someone you're very close with. in fact, sometimes when you hear things there is misunderstanding of information!! such as if it is something someone said once and then changed their mind about later, but you only hear the first statement that went viral and another thing they did years and years later with everything in between missing that frankly, doesn't make sense with the previous thing. I feel like I've noticed people treating anyone we don't personally interact with (yet because of culture end up hearing about anyway) a similar way that it's still acceptable to treat children. and neither is helpful. the person who probably needs to heal is you, and that's okay! we're pretty much all in that boat, and it's a pretty good boat to be in.

[gremlinasis]

27 - On friendship, love and differences

In the last several posts I have mentioned friendship more and more. During the past year this has been the main theme of my days, in good, neutral and destructive ways.

I have a very intense friend group and I have a sense of gratefulness for them, but I recognize certain difficulties that I need to verbalize once.

Primarily I need to highlight mental health, and mostly that how prominent it is in the interactions with my friends has become unbearable. While I love that there is no taboo and that everyone can be emotional, the line gets crossed for me when we start taking up a therapeutic role in each others lives. I need to be able to show my raw emotion without it being used later on as a cause of almost a diagnosis or an argument in why I don't have control over myself. We have completely let go of the notion that we all have different experiences and different causes for the things we struggle with. While everyone has the full right to struggle and show it, it's not healthy to transpose your own experience and therapy to someone else and simplify their experience and struggles to the mold that fits your own experience. We do not have full knowledge of someone, no one but that person has. Making that for example certain tendencies may originate in a disorder for one person, but be caused by the environment of another. Or even more importantly, that they may originate from a completely different disorder that needs different treatment.

I have talked about this but I don't get heard at all. I have a certain understanding of myself that has been built through very deep struggling and it is what I take immense pride in, but I get invalidated when I speak about what I understand myself to experience in the context of someone else having talked about similar things with their therapist and needing to convince me that my understanding is wrong and their therapy is correct. While I don't want to deny that it may be correct for them, it is not necessarily for me and talking to me as if I am wrong about myself because I disagree is a judgement of the understanding I have of myself as well as an assumption that you know better somehow, which is infantilising.

Another aspect that I have been struggling with is depth of connection and the link with love.

Three of my friends have been close to me for a year. One has been close to me for five years. There is a deep connection between me and the latter, one that has withstood an immense amount of heartache but also laughter and joy. That is fundamentally different from the relationship I have with the others, which has been forged by first finding comfort in each other during difficult times and then became a group dynamic where everyone was held to an equal standing. But I have realized that I do not see them all the same and I do feel as if my best friend had started to see me as one of the others. And in the same line that the others tell me how to behave towards my best friend from the point of view of how they want me to behave towards them. I shouldn't have believed and followed their advice but I did and it has fucked up my friendship.

Recently through experiencing the pain of not feeling like I still have a best friend as a result of this, I've realized something that I'm not sure if I can mention because I don't know how I will respond if it's not reciprocated: I like all my friends and care about them, but I love my best friend. For a while I wondered if I was going through such a difficult time because I was in love with my best friend, I really have been trying to repress the intensity of my feelings for them as a result because that would have explained why I so desperately wanted to have a closer connection again and it would be almost unfair of me to mask that within friendship. But recently I've realized that I'm this is not a romantic feeling. I simply have a very pure and deep love for them, which has been feeling one sided and which hurts somehow more than unreciprocated romantic feelings. This is far deeper than a crush would be. This is an experience of kinship and finding an extension of yourself in another, without falling into the well of transposing my struggles, but rather recognizing and amplifying my joy in another person.

And I miss joy deeply, I miss the understanding and I miss the kinship.

And losing that is worse than breaking up with someone, it's losing who made the vast expanse of life that extends beyond romantic love enjoyable.

Maybe this is codependency, although I am surviving and living and finding some level of joy with others (even newer friends), but I refuse to diagnose it as a problem. It's a pure love that I now know I can feel and that I am allowed to grieve, but also fight for.

Because fuck what everyone else thinks of it, it's sacred to me and I get to fight for it as long as I have it in me.

[casualarsonist]

The Witness (PS4) review

The Witness is the game that finally drove me insane. I see shapes everywhere now - circles connected to lines that wind their way around the sidewalks, skirting the eaves of buildings, through clouds in the sky and conspicuous smears of dirt on the ground. And as I try to comprehend the genius/madness of the development team that created a game such as this, I also feel like I see, for the most brief instant, into the infinity of the human mind, and the interconnected wonderment of the universe. 

I can’t, of course, but this game does weird things to your sense of perception. 

The Witness is a 2016 puzzle game, and one of the most mind-bending experiences I’ve ever indulged in my life. I tend to have quite an analytical way of thinking (and I can hear my uni colleagues sniggering at the memory of my poor work ethic and subsequent drop-out), and my girlfriend is a painter, and has a very artistic and spacial intelligence, so it needs to be said that I don’t think I could ever finish this game without her assistance, but with our two brains combined, playing The Witness together has become a superb, memorable, and utterly compelling exploration into the depths of our abilities as problem-solvers and lateral thinkers. 

After its release I was well-aware of all the praise the game was garnering, and yet whenever I decided to have a look at gameplay videos or screenshots I found myself distinctly unimpressed. All the puzzles were just boxes with lines, all the surfaces painted in eye-melting fluorescence; the game appeared to me to just be another small, simplistic indie puzzler that would occupy my time for a few hours before being left behind as little more than a pleasant memory. But I was wrong in my assumptions, and I believe that one of the game’s biggest flaws is that it’s almost impossible to get a true impression of what you’re in for without actually playing it. 

On paper, the concept is simple: you are stuck on a strange, seemingly man-made island that is essentially made of puzzles. Hundreds of screens litter the world, each featuring a grid, with some kind of shape or colour or marker that informs you as to the nature of the task, and while nothing is ever explicitly explained, you're usually led through a series of increasingly complex steps that both educate you on the mechanics of the puzzle, as well as challenge you to figure out how the rules have changed when they do. As you explore the island further, you’ll come to a greater understanding of the laws pertaining to each of the puzzle types, and more difficult areas will often require you to use your wits and intuition in order to recognise when and how you’re required to combine them to complete the task ahead of you. And it’s the game’s reliance on the player’s ability to educate themselves that makes playing and completing The Witness such an absolute and unparalleled joy. 

There were periods where Alice and I had been playing for hours and eventually got sick of bashing our heads against brick walls, and we would reluctantly check the wiki for a hint or solution to a particularly fiendish problem, but I always and invariably felt a sense of shame or guilt after this for having failed to put the time in to figure out the answer myself. So at a certain point I imposed an embargo on walkthroughs because we had reached a point where we were having to use all our combined experiences to find the answers, and if we cheated at that point, wouldn’t it just invalidate everything we’d worked towards up until this point? After a time we finished it. Quite quickly, all things considered. And that tangible feeling of your mind latching onto the thread of an answer and following it to a successful conclusion feels fucking amazing. Because it’s a rare instance in which you feel like the answer to any given situation is unfair - in the end, all it takes to unravel even the hardest of the tasks is for you to fully understand the mechanics and devote a bit of time with some pen and paper to finding the solution. I found myself wondering at the number of cumulative hours that this game must have lay idle on all the various consoles and computers around the world as the various players sketch out grids and work and rework solutions in order to get to the next point. I can only imagine the number lies in the thousands. 

This might make the game sound boring, or frustrating, and I can imagine that it will be for some, because this is no quick crossword - The Witness is, for all the elegance in its design, fucking hardcore. More importantly, it’s also packed with content - something like 650 puzzles, many of which you don’t need to find in order to complete the game, and some of which you may never even stumble across. So while some people might get some joy from waving their dicks around and crowing about how it was a breeze for them, for the rest of us the game will most likely be fucking exhausting at times. But I wouldn’t say that it’s ever impossible - each player will get as much or as little out of it as they choose, based almost entirely on how much mental effort they’re willing to put into it. You need to be constantly aware of your surroundings and of the way the world interacts with itself, because sometimes you’ll find yourself at a dead end for ages before simply looking down and realising the key to unlocking the puzzle lay at your feet the whole time, or perhaps a few steps behind you and to the right. And it’s the moments when you’re walking along and you see what ought to otherwise be an incidental part of the scenery - a jagged rock face, or a branch in a tree - forming a strangely conspicuous pattern, and the penny finally drops leaving you feeling like some kind of wunderkind, when really, it’s the developers that are the geniuses, and you’re just the sap who happened to notice a thing. 

And so it was after several hours that we started noticing patterns everywhere - patterns that often lead to nothing, but frequently they lead to the world’s inbuilt puzzles. I don’t want to say too much about it for fear of spoiling the feeling of finding it out yourself, but at this point we realised we were going crazy, seeing code built into every facet of the game around us. It was then that it became truly apparent just how much thought, effort, attention to detail, and finicky micromanagement must have gone into the creation of this game. It’s a wonder of a thing, and I doubt I’ll ever play anything like it again, but then I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone familiar with director/producer/designer Jonathan Blow’s work on Braid, or with his regular participation in Indie Game Jam. Because The Witness feels like the kind of game that could only be born in that kind of off-beat and fevered environment - one in which necessity dictates that innovative products are born from simple ideas taken to extremes. I never thought that anyone could stretch the ideas on display here to the extent that they have been, and that’s why I wasn’t that interested in the game before I started playing it. It’s also why it’s impossible to tell you what it’s like to play The Witness without spoiling anything, other than to describe it in terms of existential experiences it has given me. 

In any case, The Witness has given me far more than I expected, far more than I had hoped for, and far more than it needed to have given. The hours spent working together with my girlfriend have brought us closer together (even though I’m a terrible controller hog), and tested our minds and our patience while entertaining, thrilling, and spooking us along the way. It’s one of the few games that I’ve ever wanted to 100% complete, and we’ll see if that happens, but I’m addicted to the feeling of achievement now, and I need my fix. Other than that, there’s simply nothing else to say at this point beside the fact that there is no game that I know of that is comparable to this. 

10/10

[chal-converts-archive]

What’s the word limit for texts posts on Tumblr.com? Lmao I think we’re about to find out. Anyway, I wrote a long piece about last week’s parsha and the ostensibly anti-gay prohibitions and why I think they’re not what people like to make them out to be. I know this has been written on a lot, but I’d still definitely appreciate [constructive] feedback if you feel like slogging through it all.

Obviously under a cut for length.

(Seriously this thing clocks in at over 3700 words. Just fyi. Brevity is not one of my talents.) 

An analysis of the homosexual prohibitions in Leviticus

I know this has been analyzed by a lot of people and there are a number of alternative readings of these passages; however, I have yet to see one offered that I think is rather simple – almost obvious when you think about it – but I think a fair reading of them. [It’s worth noting that I’d be very surprised if this was a completely original argument; however, I have not yet seen a write-up of this theory and I’ve read up on this, so I thought I’d put it out there anyway.]

First, I think it’s worthwhile to briefly discuss my methodology and the reasons behind it. In my opinion, the overall message of the Torah is to protect human rights and to encourage loving relationships between people. Ergo, a total ban on all homosexual relationships – no matter how loving, consensual, supportive, and overall life-affirming they may be – runs counter to this message and purpose. Furthermore, it descends into the realm of cruelty when the alternative to a happy, healthy same-gender relationship is to deny a truly homosexual person access to a healthy partnership altogether. Of course, a gay man or lesbian could marry an opposite-gender friend and theoretically build a somewhat happy life with that person. That is the best possible scenario if the anti-gay interpretation of these laws is enforced. However, I think most people would agree that there is a world of difference between the love that happens between friends and the partnership of a lover. More likely, however, is that the sham marriage is built on half-truths and lies and will only lead to heartbreak later down the line. Or, the gay or lesbian person lives a celibate, solitary life, which sociological science has shown overwhelmingly leads to unhappiness, unhealthiness, and earlier death. To deny gays and lesbians the full benefit of kiddushin is therefore an unnecessary cruelty.

Bisexuality is a somewhat different conversation, because while bisexuals may find themselves able to form happy, healthy relationships with same gender folks, they also have the capacity to do so with an opposite gender partner as well. They are therefore not forced into the same cruel position as someone who could not be happy in a cis-het relationship. However, it still denies them a major aspect of self-expression. Transgender people are a whole other conversation unto ourselves, so I will focus only on binary cis men and women for this discussion.

From what I have learned so far, even if we are to take the Torah as directly from G-d and the covenant as binding, the interpretation of the Torah and the covenantal law is something that is entirely in the hands of humanity. We were given the source material, but what we do with it is “not in the heavens.” In light of that ideology, it is up to us to interpret the Torah in ways that make sense for each age and that safeguard human rights. It’s one thing to argue over whether chickens should be considered “fleischig” for kashrut purposes, seeing as they do not produce milk – and entirely another to argue over whether an entire class of people should be allowed to enter into healthy, fulfilling partnerships. The former has consequences only insofar as our religious practices goes, but does not fundamentally dehumanize or injure anyone. The latter does. This is particularly poignant the more we learn about human sexuality and the more studies show that it is a completely natural and immutable variation.

Over the years, the position of people with disabilities has changed to reflect our improved understanding of human variation and recognition of human rights. And although there is still a lot of work to be done, the position of women has changed over the years as well. The assumption that these groups were less intelligent (rather than that their society had not bothered to educate them) is offensive to modern sensibilities, and therefore our interpretations have shifted to improve their standing. This is merely yet another area of natural human variation that deserves recognition and the search for readings that protect their fundamental dignity and human rights.

Additionally, this is not a morally grey area. Few moral debates are this simple, to be quite frank. LGBQ+ sexuality does not harm a single person or have deleterious effects on any community that cannot be better attributed to homophobia. Reproduction is not a valid argument in an age of modern reproductive technology, in a country where we have quite a lot of children who need loving foster and adoptive homes, and where we completely embrace infertile, aged, and sterile heterosexual couples. In no way is it morally comparable to other banned sexual expressions, which absolutely do have corrosive and violent effects. Incest destroys the integrity of the family structure and almost always involves abusive power dynamics. Bestiality is a particularly egregious expression of cruelty to animals, who are incapable of consent. Pedophilia is child sexual abuse and has seriously damaging effects on its victims. Homosexuality is not comparable to any of these in intent or effect and therefore any slippery slope argument is invalid.

Therefore, we can easily conclude that there is no practical harm in creating a supportive environment for LGBQ+ individuals, while a significant amount of harm stems from repression of homosexuality. Ergo, objections to same-gender partnerships are rooted in religious arguments alone. We turn to those now.

My view is not that we should distort the Torah or give it disingenuous readings merely to get to a preferred answer. Rather, if what we see on the page runs counter to our sense of compassion and human rights, then the flaw is not with the Torah or with G-d, but rather our interpretation of it. We simply do not understand it correctly yet.

A fair challenge to this assertion might be, “Why would G-d make it so difficult to find a genuine and compassionate reading, then?” My answer to this is twofold: First, when has reading and comprehending Torah ever been easy? Second, I think that we’re meant to react negatively to some of these passages. There are plenty of other parts of the Torah that range from baffling to outright offensive. I think that G-d presented us with these as challenges to our compassion; will we be obedient and mindlessly enforce cruel edicts as “G-d’s will,” or, like Abraham, will we demand that the Judge of the Universe rule fairly? We might struggle with these verses, but ultimately, will we not emerge victorious, insisting that G-d’s word be read in the light most compassionate to people of all walks of life? Perhaps more importantly – what does it say about our understanding of G-d if we don’t insist on finding a compassionate understanding?

Another point about my methodology – I think any interpretation of the Torah that requires us to deny reality or scientific progress is not only counterproductive and incorrect, but actively flies in the face of G-d’s gift of intelligence and the power of the human mind and is therefore actively anti-religious. We are a curious species and our ingenuity is especially exemplary of our being b’tzelem Elohim; to stick our heads in the sand instead of exploring and learning about this vast, gorgeous creation we were entrusted with on religious grounds is itself a perverse use of the Torah.

A couple of assumptions I tend to make in my analyses: Our ancestors/spiritual predecessors were very concerned about creating a fair, safe, sanitary, moral, and orderly society in the context of their historical circumstances; and, they knew more than we modern folks often like to give them credit for. They may not have had the advantage of the scientific advances we’ve made by this point in the twenty-first century, but they were intelligent and observant of their surroundings. Ergo, there are usually reasons for prohibitions or expectations, most of which were likely based on their observations of the world. I think it’s reasonable to imagine that they carefully watched the results of certain actions, noticed patterns, and assumed that the natural law was one and the same as divine Law; if the Creator of all things structured the world in such a way that certain actions or foods caused sickness and death, then it was a message that these things were immoral or forbidden, even if we weren’t completely sure of why.

Some of these observations were likely idiosyncratic or due to chance; however, I think it’s also reasonable to assume that some were due to a lack of modern sanitation and refrigeration or other technology. In light of our progress to date, it’s worthwhile to look at this latter category with the purpose of understanding what they were trying to accomplish. If we can suss out these underlying values, we can better come up with a modern equivalent that is actually equivalent. Many of what these laws were intended to accomplish in their day have completely unrelated and unintended effects when held to completely literally in the modern world. However, the underlying values are often universal and speak to us just as clearly today as they did thousands of years ago. I think it’s important to honor these values as much as possible, even if our means of doing so looks very different today than it did then.

With all that in mind, I now turn to the verses in question.

A lot of the analyses of these Leviticus verses I’ve seen bend over backwards to read it as saying something other than what it seems to be saying, or to contextualize it out of relevance. Alternatively, they fundamentally alter how we read the Torah. These verses do not pose a threat to the Reform movement’s support for LGBQ+ rights, of course, because they are not held to be binding on modern Jews. However, I don’t think you need to analyze the Torah strangely or disingenuously or fundamentally alter how you read the Torah to find a compassionate reading of these verses, even if you view the covenant as binding and the Torah as G-d given. That said, I also don’t think the traditionalist reading of these passages of Leviticus is particularly accurate. Let me explain.

So in this section, we see a lot of prohibitions on forbidden forms of sexuality. Most of them relate to incest and a couple to bestiality – things that the overwhelming majority of the population rightly agrees are immoral. It’s worth looking at the framing of these other prohibitions, because that will tell us something about how to understand the construction of the passages about homosexuality. My training is in law, and within secular legal analysis, one common method for interpreting a statute is to read it in context with itself under the assumption that author formulated not only the ideas but the written structure of the statute itself with intent. If we assume that the Torah was written – or at least inspired by – the ultimate Author, it seems reasonable to use this approach here.  

Two things immediately leap out to me when I read these passages together in context. First, the structure of the sentence, while consistent between the two verses in question, is completely different than the other verses in this section. Second, it specifically addresses male homosexuality, and only male homosexuality, despite clearly addressing women’s sexual behavior in the other verses.

Observation #1. I think it’s pretty clear that these verses are talking about sex, and likely not addressing rape. (I don’t want to totally invalidate that possible reading of it, but that has been explored much more eloquently elsewhere.) A cheeky reading of this would be to take “lies” literally rather than to read it as a metaphor for sex; that seems unreasonable given the fact that the other verses pretty explicitly refer to sex and this euphemism is used elsewhere to mean sex. So I think we can pretty safely read “lies with” as “has sex with.”

What isn’t clear to me, however, and what I think the traditional readings of it fail to address, is that the sentence construction differs from the other prohibitions in a way that seems pretty significant. Where the other verses flatly prohibit “uncovering the nakedness” of one’s family members or simply say “lies with,” these verses both go out of their way to say “lies with a male as one lies with a woman.” In traditional readings of this, this distinction is seen as a way of emphasizing that the prohibition is sexual in nature, but this explanation is incredibly weak. Considering that the euphemism here is consistently used in a sexual context, and the verses both occur in lists of sexual prohibitions, there’s absolutely no need to clarify that this isn’t referring to simply sharing a tent with another man.

Reading it this way renders this additional phrasing superfluous, which is problematic if you believe in Divine authorship, considering the teaching that every letter in the Torah has its own purpose and is important in its own right. In fact, one of the traditional rules of construction in interpreting Torah is that you don’t render any part of it superfluous. The fact that this additional phrasing is repeated in both verses makes this problematic even if you believe in human authorship, because it indicates that this isn’t merely a flowery way of framing the issue, but an essential piece of the verse. Furthermore, it’s clear from the preceding and following verses that the author(s) knew how to flatly state the law, making it less likely that this is simply wordiness.

Therefore, it makes sense to give some serious consideration to what the purpose of this disambiguation is. “Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman” begs the question of, “as opposed to…?” which contains another, deeper question: If a disambiguation is necessary, then it inherently means that not all sex between men is prohibited. If all sex with men was prohibited, then the human author(s) or Author, having stated a total bar for other forbidden relations without a problem directly above and below these verses, could have simply said, “Do not lie with another man.” Or, perhaps, “Do not uncover the nakedness of another man.” That is not what either verse says, inherently limiting the scope of the prohibition.

If the prohibition is whatever sex a man could have that is the same as sex with a woman, then the question becomes one of how to construe the meaning of “as one lies with a woman.” To understand the scope of the actual prohibition, we must understand what it means to lie with a woman [as a man.]

As important as this is, I will leave this question for a moment and move on to another important consideration:

Observation #2 – this prohibition is limited to male/male relationships. Female/female relationships are not prohibited here or anywhere else. If the intent was to enforce heterosexual relationships, or at a minimum, to prevent homosexual sexuality, then either these verses should have said something to the effect of, “Do not lie with one of the same sex as yourself,” or correlating phrases specifying that female/female relationships are equally verboten should have also been included.

The argument that this is simply another instance of the “universal man” or masculine default that is common in the Torah holds absolutely no water in a list that explicitly prohibits women from committing bestiality. While the incest clauses are not directly addressed to women, they do not need to be; enjoining the men from these relationships has the same result as banning it for both sexes. Bestiality is likely singled out because no human male need be involved if a woman were to commit this offense. Therefore, enjoining men alone would effectively allow it for women in a way that is not the case for the incest clauses. However, by definition, a woman lying with another woman as she would with a man creates the possibility of a sexual encounter that excludes men entirely and therefore cannot be prevented by verses aimed at men.

Nor can the inverse simply be implied. The Author or author(s) of this list were clearly concerned enough about women’s sexual conduct to include the female equivalent of the male bestiality prohibition. It was therefore contemplated that women had enough sexual agency to commit despicable acts that must be forbidden explicitly. Should there have been an equal concern for female/female relationships, it could easily have been added, and this cannot be chalked up to an instance where women’s sexual agency and resulting conduct simply wasn’t contemplated. Clearly the concept that women could commit obscene acts all on their own was contemplated and directly addressed.

What are we to do with this information? Well, to me it’s a clue that says look closer – not everything is as it appears. If nothing else, it tells us that the moral concern wasn’t same sex partnerships as a category of behavior. The specific concern was regarding sex between men as one lies with a woman. So let us return to that question.

What does it mean for a man to lie with a woman?

Unfortunately, the text doesn’t give us any clear idea of what specific class of sexual acts was being contemplated here. The only sexual act that one could commit with a woman that one could not commit with a man is vaginal intercourse. As it would be impossible (barring an understanding of trans folks that stretches the boundaries of credulity) to have vaginal intercourse with another man, this understanding of the verse would render it superfluous. So this cannot be the answer.

Other arguments have said that the difference is power-related; that men at the time were considered sexual agents in a way that women were not, and therefore penetrating a man was to dishonor him. While I won’t entirely disregard that possibility, as person raised as a girl, as a non-binary person who is still socially read as a woman quite often, and as a feminist, I have serious problems with this argument. Even if it may be historically accurate, hinging the argument for the equal rights of LGBQ+ folks on the concept that sex is something that is done to women by men rather than an equal, consensual relationship builds a house on a foundation of sand. Yes, you can argue that this seemingly degrading interpretation actually leads to a prohibition on rape (of anyone) but this argument feels very circular to me. Furthermore, there are several examples of rape in the Tanakh, and so the known distinction between a regular heterosexual relationship (regardless of the very real gendered power dynamic involved) and rape elsewhere undermines this interpretation.

More importantly, I don’t think you have to get that deep into implications or obscurities to find a perfectly reasonable alternative to a total ban on sex between men. I have already explained my theory that the prohibition only applies to a sub-class of sexual activity between men; now the only remaining work to be done is to parse out what that distinction actually is.

If I may make what seems like an almost too-simple suggestion: The point is the distinction itself.

There are two paths one can go from here, and it depends on your interpretation of the mitzvot. If you are of the school of thought that the rational justifications for any mitzvah are completely irrelevant because the be-all, end-all reason for doing them is because G-d asked us to, then the analysis is very simple. If, on the other hand, you are of the school of thought that needs some kind of rational reason for engaging in or refraining from something aside from simply as a promise to Hashem, then the analysis is a bit more complex. Either way, the argument stands.

In the first stream of thought, there are many places in the Torah where G-d asks us to make distinctions between one thing and another, and many times this is gendered. Within even this same section, we are asked not to mix fibers, as one example. There is no rational explanation for this (as far as I’m aware) and yet it is asked of us. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise us that G-d would ask men to make a distinction between the way they engage in sex with men versus the way they engage in sex with women. For heterosexual men, this is not a concern, because they will not want to engage in sex with men at all. Similarly, for homosexual men, this not a concern because they will not be engaging in sex with women at all. The distinction is made by the person’s sexuality alone. However, for men who engage in sex with men and women (or at least have the capacity to be attracted to either men or women) a distinction must be made. Because it is not specifically stated what this distinction must be, it seems reasonable to suggest that the bisexual man in question determine what that distinction needs to be for himself.

However, to address the other stream of thought – I do have a suggestion for one way to think about this. Going back to my earlier commentary about the history and intelligence of these ancient peoples, it’s worth considering this from a practical standpoint. Many of these rules seem to be intended to protect the public health, and I think this falls into that camp. At that time, without the benefit of sterile lubricant and condoms (or other barriers), anal sex ran a much higher risk of injury and infection. After watching enough men become sick from engaging in anal sex with other men, it’s likely that they noted the pattern (and probably associated the practice with the pagans they were so concerned about distinguishing themselves from) and deduced that it must be displeasing to G-d. Meanwhile, the natural lubrication of the vagina, as well as its acidity prevents most of these types of infections and injuries. The observed difference then, was a safe/unsafe distinction.

With modern sanitation and safer sex methods, I would argue that a useful modern distinction could be that while a man having sex with a woman may sometimes not want to use a protective barrier for reproductive purposes, men who also want to have sex with men should always use protection when doing so. This preserves the value of public health by promoting safer sex, as well as the command to make a distinction between sexual methods with men and women. Furthermore, it doesn’t require any mental gymnastics, alternative methods of reading the Torah, or hinge on the degradation of women.

[mythoshunter]

Experience

The problem of “experience” is a thorny one. In some respects, it’s faulty. That’s been known by thinkers for hundreds of years: that it’s subjective and never complete, for example.

However in this day and age, we increasingly hear the expression “invalidating my/our experiences”. It’s usually being used as a God Argument (see earlier post): an act of one-upmanship to shut down questioning and ‘discourse’ around today’s thorniest topics. One field we see this is a lot is around microaggressions: an insidious form of racism. The thing is that people can mean different things by some of the expressions classed under ‘microaggressions’ because the racism inside of them is in some ways, latent or subtle, certainly it’s not obvious to the white/male/middle-class/western mind.

When we use full-on open swearing to denigrate someone, say by using the N-word, the word is so unequivocally racist and linked to racism that the intent behind the word is obvious. It is racism, no one could ever argue otherwise unless they themselves were trying to argue racism doesn’t exist or something like that...

But microaggressions are more subtle and thus more ambiguous. I recently saw the expression “America is a melting pot” classified as one. Now- this (to my white and male mind) is one of the more complex cases of microaggression. Something like “No, but where do you really come from?” has a far more obvious intention: to say this sentence, the speaker has singled out the interlocutor’s so-called ‘otherness’, has not accepted their everyday response that “I grew up in London/New York” etc and wants an answer relating to their heritage. It’s an accusation and a question based on an assumption about a piece of unnecessary information all in one. 

In the case of “America is a melting pot” though, it’s more complex. The sentence on one level suggests that nationalities in America meld into one unidentifiable ‘American’ mass: perhaps this is (in an age where there is a push to “reclaim your roots”) an ideology that is no longer suited to/liked by the American mindset, then? I don’t know. If that’s the case, the issue needs addressing though, discussing: not simply censoring. Censoring is an act of shutting down: people rarely react well to it. Perhaps here, the best way forward is to put up with something for a few more months while awareness is built and the discussion is had and then at the end, everyone is hopefully in agreement that the ideology is crass. 

The sentence also suggests a certain ease with which nationalities meld into one in America: this, for many people, is not true. Naturalisation is difficult, fraught with difficulty, often pushed on (but also impeded?) by racism. 

There is also a certain ideological thing running behind the phrase. America is in some senses a melting pot, but melting pot normally implies a big variety of ingredients and America is fundamentally dominated to this day by Western Europeans (ex-Brits, Irish, German, French, Dutch, Italian etc). Thus “melting pot” implies something positively varied where the reality is a bit more homogeneous? In more blunt terms, a bit more white?

Perhaps there are other problems with the expression that I can’t see. This expression is very old as concerns America and it represents one of the founding ideologies of America: that people of all nations can come to America to find a home. This means that to censor it will be very difficult and (to many minds) an attack on American ideology itself.. I’m not saying I agree with this, I’m simply identifying possible problems with censorship. In our current clime, ever more torn, ever more violent, still very white: perhaps this phrase seems ever more cruel because “people of all nations” are not able come to America right now and find peace and success and a welcoming home because of the rifts splitting the country.

The problem with labelling something as “racist” is that the term blankets it. In the case of these more nuanced microaggressions though, we might say such a statement with many intentions: such a broad and hackneyed could have a million intentions behind it, it needs explaining. This is not to say that racism cannot be unintended: racism CAN be unintended. But when it isn’t: surely it’s always best to have the conversation, point out why the expression is harmful, discuss it, get a conversation going: then hopefully get an apology. Rather than simply rising up in anger. Fire fuels other fires.

The question of our “experience” of racism with these more complex cases is itself more complex. Racism when its unintended is a more complex case. Such a line as “you’re invalidating my experiences” gets my hackles raised because it is a God Argument- it is designed to shut down conversation. The thing is, I can question some aspect of your experiences without invalidating them. We all only ever have a single perspective on a situation: our own, and any comment, any speech act requires two people. With blatant swear-word-style racism, the other person’s intentions and desires are obvious. With microaggressions they aren’t always. 

One good example of this I’ve seen recently is statements like “if you don’t agree with me, you’re a racist”. Whilst I agree with what is being pointed out entirely (systemic racism, police brutality etc): my hackles are raised by the statement, because while of course I will never argue against someone’s experience of racism: I will always argue that a binary view on things is bad. Even in a court of law after a person has been convicted even of murder: they are able to make statements and appeals. Under this binary “with me or against me” thinking: there is no space for that. Even if the appeal (in a case of microaggression) is to say sorry, to ask what he/she/they said was wrong: surely that is worth something?

ANY shutting down of conversation (I feel) is deadly dangerous. I will always be after a philosophy of nuance and conversation. Because it’s a slippery slope: once you get a taste for shutting down conversations, for using God-Arguments, it becomes a more and more frequent thing.

And so what I’m trying to say is that if someone is offended by something (no matter how subtle the racism) while we should never tell someone to “get over themselves/grow a pair/grow up/etc”, we should also NOT be simply asking the guilty party to not explain what they meant. Because in a lot of these complex microaggressive cases, by talking things through, the guilty party can come to see why the other person feels offended, they can explain what they were trying to say (and hopefully it had a good intention). In these cases then, the offended party can also come to see and understand that the racism was not ill-intended. While this does NOT negate the fact that it was racism, surely an apology and an understanding is a better thing than a simple storming out “I’m never talking to you again, you racist!” scenario?

Experience is not inviolable: and, ironically, to say that “you’re invalidating my experience” is more often than not actually invalidating the other person’s experience instead. At the very least, it invalidates their own thoughts on a matter. 

[sunshineweb]

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect

The parable of six blind men and an elephant, goes like this —

When a group of blind men, who had never come across an elephant before, encounter the tusker for the first time, they try to conceptualize the animal by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one body part, such as the tail or the trunk. Then they discuss their understanding about the elephant.

The man who had touched the elephant’s side says, “It’s very much like a wall.”

The one who held the elephant’s tusk declares, “No! it’s like a smooth spear.”

“Not really. It’s like a python.” Claims the man who grabbed the trunk.

“You’re all mistaken.” shouts the man who got the elephant’s tail. “It’s like a thick rope.”

“I know we’re all blind but have you guys lost your mind also?” The fifth man who touched the animal’s ears says, “It’s like a big fan.”

“Come on, folks! What’s wrong with all of you?” Argues the sixth man who was leaning against the elephant’s knee, “It’s definitely like a tree.”

Image Source: John Godfre Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”

Who was right? In a way, everyone was right about what they perceived. At the same time, everyone was wrong about the elephant because their limited experience allowed them to figure out only a smaller chunk of reality in isolation.

The elephant in the fable is an apt metaphor for the complex problems we encounter in the real world. And who are those six blind men? Those are us — handicapped by our tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited, subjective experience.

The fable is a reminder of how our overconfidence divorces us from other’s viewpoint and makes us unwilling to accept the fact that those who disagree with us are also under the spell of the same bias — looking at the problem from a single dimension.

Anne Duke in her book Thinking in Bets writes —

We’ve all experienced situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives. This is known as Rashomon Effect, named for the 1950 cinematic classic Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa. The central element of the otherwise simple plot was how incompleteness is a tool for bias. In the film, four people give separate, drastically different accounts of a scene they all observed, the seduction (or rape) of a woman by a bandit, the bandit’s duel with her husband (if there was a duel), and the husband’s death (from losing the duel, murder, or suicide).

Akira Kurosawa deliberately used elements of perception and subjectivity to present conflicting versions of the same event through different characters in the storyline. This contradictory interpretation of the same event boggles the minds of the viewers because they are constantly trying to guess who is right and what actually happened.

The movie was a great commercial success and Akira’s insight — relativity of truth and the unreliability and inevitable subjectivity of the human memory — was recognized in the world outside the cinema also. The lawyers and judges commonly speak of The Rashomon Effect when first-hand witnesses give contradictory testimonies.

The Bollywood film Talvar — based on the 2008 Noida double murder case — used the Rashomon effect. The film depicts the investigation of the case from three different perspectives in which victims’s parents are either guilty or innocent of the murder charges by the police investigation, the first CBI probe and later an investigation by a different CBI team.

So why does this happen? Why do different people have such dramatically different accounts of the same event? Maybe they’re lying. That’s plausible but an easy explanation and pretty much useless in solving the problem. However, there’s another possibility.

Humans interpret any incident based on their own perceptions. Like those six blind men.

So, even when the incident is an independent event, what’s observed is modified by the observer’s mindset, experiences, and expectations. And when it comes to the recollection of the event, another distortion is layered by the memory. It is due to this that it becomes maddeningly hard to verify the truth based on narratives given by different people.

Morgan Housel, in his essay The Psychology of Money, writes —

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. If you were born in 1970 the stock market went up 10-fold adjusted for inflation in your teens and 20s – your young impressionable years when you were learning baseline knowledge about how investing and the economy work. If you were born in 1950, the same market went exactly nowhere in your teens and 20s.

When everyone has experienced a fraction of what’s out there but uses those experiences to explain everything they expect to happen, a lot of people eventually become disappointed, confused, or dumbfounded at others’ decisions. Keep that quote in mind when debating people’s investing views. Or when you’re confused about their desire to hoard or blow money, their fear or greed in certain situations, or whenever else you can’t understand why people do what they do with money. Things will make more sense.

Brushing aside disagreement with others with an assumption that others are misinformed or are stupid doesn’t help the situation. When you become curious about why others believe what they believe, you open up the possibility to unearth important information that might help you in updating your worldview and making better decisions.

Everyone’s watching a different movie, writes Housel, “Personal financial success is all relative measured against the amount of effort you put into it and the expectations you set for yourself. Both are different for everyone. What seems trivial to you might be the most important thing in the world to me, especially if we’re at different stages in life – low interest rates are great for young borrowers, but disastrous for retirees needing fixed income. We’re all coming from a different place with different perspectives, which explains why so many equally smart people in finance and economics disagree with each other. When you find something crazy in finance and ask yourself “Why is this happening?,” the answer is usually “because someone with a different perspective thinks it should.”

Duke writes —

Even without conflicting versions, the Rashomon Effect reminds us that we can’t assume one version of a story is accurate or complete. We can’t count on someone else to provide the other side of the story, or any individual’s version to provide a full and objective accounting of all the relevant information. When presenting a decision for discussion, we should be mindful of details we might be omitting and be extra-safe by adding anything that could possibly be relevant. On the evaluation side, we must query each other to extract those details when necessary.

The lesson here is that we should never be overconfident about one version of the truth, especially the one we believe in. Being adamant about our version of truth makes it hard for us to share information that could give others a chance to find flaws in our decision-making. And that would eventually lead to fooling ourselves. That’s why Richard Feynman observed that fooling ourselves is the easiest thing to do.

Commenting on scientific truth-seeking, Feynman said —

A kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results…

We have to realize that the elephant of reality hides in it a huge amount of information. And our cognitive abilities are limited and can never absorb all the details available at any given moment.

Reminds me of this intriguing quote from famous mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. He writes —

Within infinite myths lies the eternal truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes, Indra has a hundred, You and I, only two.

Which means we can never be sure of what we see as reality. However, being unsure doesn’t mean being indecisive. It means that this lack of surety is an opportunity to use it as a motivation to keep updating our hypothesis and acknowledge our fallibility so that the downside can be protected if our hypothesis turns out to be false.

Seeing the reality as it is may not make your life necessarily more comfortable. Most probably it won’t. But the idea of comfort itself is an illusion.

Anne writes —

In the movie, the matrix was built to be more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable…Giving that up is not the easiest choice. By choosing to exit the matrix, we are asserting that striving for a more objective representation of the world, even if it is uncomfortable at times, will make us happier and more successful in the long run.

Conclusion

The world’s smartest problem-solvers and decision-makers rely on a set of frameworks and mental models that help make decisions and separate good ideas from the bad.

These mental models help you perceive the reality in a manner which is closer to the truth. Once you learn these mental models, it becomes easy to change your own actions and avoid common traps.

A latticework of mental models assists you in interacting with the world with better results. Having these mental models in your head is like a bag of lego blocks which you can use to build your own decision-making framework and discover new insights on how the world really works.

The post Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[inmomni]

No. 17

This one is going to be a bit different

in the sense that it won't be to condemn every fiber of my being but to reflect on what I have learned, frankly about myself in the past few months since the new year started. 

I don't like mediocrity. I won't stand for it. 

And this comes one of two ways for me: 

Motivates the hell out of me to do my very best to reflect the fullest the extent of my capabilities

This expresses itself in a lot of different ways, a lot of which I can find examples of from the past. For example, in learning guitar, I would not give up until I could play a certain piece or even a few measures of a song, working painstakingly for hours on end. Reading a book, for instance, maybe this is a bad habit, I’m not particularly sure, however, I would much rather prefer to read an entire book in one sitting than to read it in pieces in fear that I will forget details crucial to the argument or continuity of the book. Other manifestations can be found even in this journal entry as the title down to the formatting and font is thought through so that it looks the best in an aesthetic fashion. Lab reports are also done in great detail and care with figures drawn well and detailed. But most of all, in my relationships and passions, I pride myself in doing things well and being competent enough to be able to hold my own.

Prevents me from doing things that I would otherwise do if I was not so wrapped up in doing things so perfectly and correctly, even the smallest and simplest things (ex. playing video games, playing sports, trying new hobbies, etc.)

This is what you would call the perfectionistic side of me. Where if something is not subjectively “perfect” or ample enough in my eyes, I will stress over the possibilities of failure prior to my engagement, inevitably preventing myself from proceeding with business as usual. In other words, I have romantic notions or ideas of what things are supposed to look like based on what I feel I should be capable of and comparing myself to others.

I bolded the problematic portions.

The issue is that I still don't really have a great way of dealing with this. It's bad because it tends to spiral out of control originating from a single thought whose intentions, in fact, may have been completely harmless from the start. I get wrapped up in my own head looking out into the world with a perverted perception that just feeds more into this picture of myself that I’m trying to create. Not only that, I become almost defensive of this view, harboring it like truth, and refuse to part from this lesser self to pursue the work of becoming better.  Because resetting is easier than improving. Coming from a blank slate is 10000% better than building upon failures and lifting yourself up.  Also, it's less painful in terms of pride.

I’m not as open and honest as I think.

           Many times, when I give answers to people, I think that telling them the worst of me is being honest, that allowing them to peer inside that disgusting side of me early on is being honest and open. But as I keep telling myself these things, 'I’m a prideful person'. 'I don’t think much of myself’, 'I’m not really going through a good time', 'I have a lot of issues I need to deal with'. these things start assuming my identity. It isn't any more that Inmo is currently tired or is depressed or that I’m not feeling my best today, but that Inmo is a tired person who is by character depressed and is out of the ordinary to see happy or smiling. Sooner or later, people start affirming you in those observations, manifesting as identity and characterization.  Then suddenly, this thing that I used to use for my “open and honest” shpeal would then dilute into some scapegoat answer to hide what is too difficult to dig through and unearth. The only person I think I am the most honest to out of my own personal volition is Mindy. Which makes it difficult for her too being that its pressure from me to have her understand where I’m coming from, and it's not good to put all your eggs in one basket in terms of closeness of relationships. A lot of it is fear of rejection I think, having that I set expectations so low for people so that I won't get hurt. But in the end, I found that this only pushes people away, and even prevents you from establishing that closeness in the first place.  I’m learning this with Mindy slowly, very slowly, but I have yet to implement this into friendships and other relationships. This is something that I need to work on.

I think I would like to be a morning person.

          I like being productive, I really like it. In fact, if I get things going well from the morning, I tend to have a really good day and even suffer along the way to make sure that I stay productive. I feel accomplished just by waking up early and establishing a start to my day. But often times this comes only in conjunction with the first characteristic I listed in this post.  If I do not wake up on time, or if I end up missing something, I am unable to recover from this “failure” and proceed throughout my day. Just something I’ve noticed. But i remember that during my freshman year of college, when I think I was at my “peak” per say, I was waking up every morning with a sense of purpose, rolling out of bed, going to run 2 miles, coming back to shower, get to class, and get on with my day. That felt good.  And this last fall semester, when I had 8:30 am classes, though it was painful to wake up during that time, I would often feel good about myself for getting up early and productively starting my day, giving an excuse for doing leisurely things at night to rest. This also means routine, that having a structure in my life would be great and beneficial to me. But the negative portion of having a perfectionistic mindset is problematic to have this started.  I need a sense of purpose, as much as any other person in this world, and I need to find a purpose to wake up with every morning so that the first thoughts in my head aren’t ‘fuck its morning, what did I already miss today?’ but rather something more along the lines of ‘Okay, I woke up at a reasonable time, and if I woke up late, it's okay, we try again tomorrow, but let's keep going today, I don't want to feel terrible.’. LOL, I don't know, something like that I suppose.

I can see how sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are the motherfuckers you need to watch out for.

I have been learning that I have a ton of emotions and not a lot of smart ways to deal with them. I remember back in high school too when I would have these burning emotions inside of me with no clear or comfortable way to address them. So I did what I thought was best to deal with it: I didn’t look at it. Rather, I invalidated myself a lot, teaching principles that lead me to believe that emotions are a hindrance and they have no part in the life of a successful, intelligent person’s life. I prided myself on having built such a tough shell around my weak heart that in the end, nothing mattered other than getting to where you needed to get to. This for me turned into a pursuit of comfort, easy, peace, no hurt, nothing to worry about, a true Hakuna Matata of sorts if you will. This is a good way to get around in the world alone, making sure that you're needs are met first and foremost. But it turns out that you don't even get that simple thing done, cause you just end up invalidating yourself and torturing yourself for feeling things that honestly do make sense for a sane person in that situation to feel, given the same series of events. I need to learn how to properly process things in ways that isolate my character and my worth as a person from the potentially negative situation I may be in at the moment. In other words, I need to realize that though I may have caused the problem, it doesn't take away from the fact that I am still capable of finding the solution to bring myself and whoever involved to a better place. Words have the power to change the way you perceive and think about yourself, and they definitely have the potential to ingrain certain harmful assumptions into reality. I learned this and am currently working through the consequences of this, peeling back all the different distorting filters I have on reality to find a more objective way of thinking of things, rather than just resorting to calling myself a failure. I need to learn to love myself better, yes in routine and action, but also in word and thought. This would look like keeping myself in a positive light and lifting myself up rather than tearing myself down in the face of adversity.

These are just a few things that I'll jot down for tonight, given that it's already 2:18 am... fudge. I was going to go to the chapel. Maybe not. Sigh... Anyways, I hope that ill get in the habit of writing more of these kinds of posts.  I hope I did this correctly hahaha. There's a lot for me to learn about myself, and I’m going to try to use this as a medium to bounce off my thoughts in a more correct fashion than just complaining and thinking all is lost. 

[sunshineweb]

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect

The parable of six blind men and an elephant, goes like this —

When a group of blind men, who had never come across an elephant before, encounter the tusker for the first time, they try to conceptualize the animal by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one body part, such as the tail or the trunk. Then they discuss their understanding about the elephant.

The man who had touched the elephant’s side says, “It’s very much like a wall.”

The one who held the elephant’s tusk declares, “No! it’s like a smooth spear.”

“Not really. It’s like a python.” Claims the man who grabbed the trunk.

“You’re all mistaken.” shouts the man who got the elephant’s tail. “It’s like a thick rope.”

“I know we’re all blind but have you guys lost your mind also?” The fifth man who touched the animal’s ears says, “It’s like a big fan.”

“Come on, folks! What’s wrong with all of you?” Argues the sixth man who was leaning against the elephant’s knee, “It’s definitely like a tree.”

Image Source: John Godfre Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”

Who was right? In a way, everyone was right about what they perceived. At the same time, everyone was wrong about the elephant because their limited experience allowed them to figure out only a smaller chunk of reality in isolation.

The elephant in the fable is an apt metaphor for the complex problems we encounter in the real world. And who are those six blind men? Those are us — handicapped by our tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited, subjective experience.

The fable is a reminder of how our overconfidence divorces us from other’s viewpoint and makes us unwilling to accept the fact that those who disagree with us are also under the spell of the same bias — looking at the problem from a single dimension.

Anne Duke in her book Thinking in Bets writes —

We’ve all experienced situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives. This is known as Rashomon Effect, named for the 1950 cinematic classic Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa. The central element of the otherwise simple plot was how incompleteness is a tool for bias. In the film, four people give separate, drastically different accounts of a scene they all observed, the seduction (or rape) of a woman by a bandit, the bandit’s duel with her husband (if there was a duel), and the husband’s death (from losing the duel, murder, or suicide).

Akira Kurosawa deliberately used elements of perception and subjectivity to present conflicting versions of the same event through different characters in the storyline. This contradictory interpretation of the same event boggles the minds of the viewers because they are constantly trying to guess who is right and what actually happened.

The movie was a great commercial success and Akira’s insight — relativity of truth and the unreliability and inevitable subjectivity of the human memory — was recognized in the world outside the cinema also. The lawyers and judges commonly speak of The Rashomon Effect when first-hand witnesses give contradictory testimonies.

The Bollywood film Talvar — based on the 2008 Noida double murder case — used the Rashomon effect. The film depicts the investigation of the case from three different perspectives in which victims’s parents are either guilty or innocent of the murder charges by the police investigation, the first CBI probe and later an investigation by a different CBI team.

So why does this happen? Why do different people have such dramatically different accounts of the same event? Maybe they’re lying. That’s plausible but an easy explanation and pretty much useless in solving the problem. However, there’s another possibility.

Humans interpret any incident based on their own perceptions. Like those six blind men.

So, even when the incident is an independent event, what’s observed is modified by the observer’s mindset, experiences, and expectations. And when it comes to the recollection of the event, another distortion is layered by the memory. It is due to this that it becomes maddeningly hard to verify the truth based on narratives given by different people.

Morgan Housel, in his essay The Psychology of Money, writes —

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. If you were born in 1970 the stock market went up 10-fold adjusted for inflation in your teens and 20s – your young impressionable years when you were learning baseline knowledge about how investing and the economy work. If you were born in 1950, the same market went exactly nowhere in your teens and 20s.

When everyone has experienced a fraction of what’s out there but uses those experiences to explain everything they expect to happen, a lot of people eventually become disappointed, confused, or dumbfounded at others’ decisions. Keep that quote in mind when debating people’s investing views. Or when you’re confused about their desire to hoard or blow money, their fear or greed in certain situations, or whenever else you can’t understand why people do what they do with money. Things will make more sense.

Brushing aside disagreement with others with an assumption that others are misinformed or are stupid doesn’t help the situation. When you become curious about why others believe what they believe, you open up the possibility to unearth important information that might help you in updating your worldview and making better decisions.

Everyone’s watching a different movie, writes Housel, “Personal financial success is all relative measured against the amount of effort you put into it and the expectations you set for yourself. Both are different for everyone. What seems trivial to you might be the most important thing in the world to me, especially if we’re at different stages in life – low interest rates are great for young borrowers, but disastrous for retirees needing fixed income. We’re all coming from a different place with different perspectives, which explains why so many equally smart people in finance and economics disagree with each other. When you find something crazy in finance and ask yourself “Why is this happening?,” the answer is usually “because someone with a different perspective thinks it should.”

Duke writes —

Even without conflicting versions, the Rashomon Effect reminds us that we can’t assume one version of a story is accurate or complete. We can’t count on someone else to provide the other side of the story, or any individual’s version to provide a full and objective accounting of all the relevant information. When presenting a decision for discussion, we should be mindful of details we might be omitting and be extra-safe by adding anything that could possibly be relevant. On the evaluation side, we must query each other to extract those details when necessary.

The lesson here is that we should never be overconfident about one version of the truth, especially the one we believe in. Being adamant about our version of truth makes it hard for us to share information that could give others a chance to find flaws in our decision-making. And that would eventually lead to fooling ourselves. That’s why Richard Feynman observed that fooling ourselves is the easiest thing to do.

Commenting on scientific truth-seeking, Feynman said —

A kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results…

We have to realize that the elephant of reality hides in it a huge amount of information. And our cognitive abilities are limited and can never absorb all the details available at any given moment.

Reminds me of this intriguing quote from famous mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. He writes —

Within infinite myths lies the eternal truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes, Indra has a hundred, You and I, only two.

Which means we can never be sure of what we see as reality. However, being unsure doesn’t mean being indecisive. It means that this lack of surety is an opportunity to use it as a motivation to keep updating our hypothesis and acknowledge our fallibility so that the downside can be protected if our hypothesis turns out to be false.

Seeing the reality as it is may not make your life necessarily more comfortable. Most probably it won’t. But the idea of comfort itself is an illusion.

Anne writes —

In the movie, the matrix was built to be more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable…Giving that up is not the easiest choice. By choosing to exit the matrix, we are asserting that striving for a more objective representation of the world, even if it is uncomfortable at times, will make us happier and more successful in the long run.

Conclusion

The world’s smartest problem-solvers and decision-makers rely on a set of frameworks and mental models that help make decisions and separate good ideas from the bad.

These mental models help you perceive the reality in a manner which is closer to the truth. Once you learn these mental models, it becomes easy to change your own actions and avoid common traps.

A latticework of mental models assists you in interacting with the world with better results. Having these mental models in your head is like a bag of lego blocks which you can use to build your own decision-making framework and discover new insights on how the world really works.

The post Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[sunshineweb]

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect

The parable of six blind men and an elephant, goes like this —

When a group of blind men, who had never come across an elephant before, encounter the tusker for the first time, they try to conceptualize the animal by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one body part, such as the tail or the trunk. Then they discuss their understanding about the elephant.

The man who had touched the elephant’s side says, “It’s very much like a wall.”

The one who held the elephant’s tusk declares, “No! it’s like a smooth spear.”

“Not really. It’s like a python.” Claims the man who grabbed the trunk.

“You’re all mistaken.” shouts the man who got the elephant’s tail. “It’s like a thick rope.”

“I know we’re all blind but have you guys lost your mind also?” The fifth man who touched the animal’s ears says, “It’s like a big fan.”

“Come on, folks! What’s wrong with all of you?” Argues the sixth man who was leaning against the elephant’s knee, “It’s definitely like a tree.”

Image Source: John Godfre Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”

Who was right? In a way, everyone was right about what they perceived. At the same time, everyone was wrong about the elephant because their limited experience allowed them to figure out only a smaller chunk of reality in isolation.

The elephant in the fable is an apt metaphor for the complex problems we encounter in the real world. And who are those six blind men? Those are us — handicapped by our tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited, subjective experience.

The fable is a reminder of how our overconfidence divorces us from other’s viewpoint and makes us unwilling to accept the fact that those who disagree with us are also under the spell of the same bias — looking at the problem from a single dimension.

Anne Duke in her book Thinking in Bets writes —

We’ve all experienced situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives. This is known as Rashomon Effect, named for the 1950 cinematic classic Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa. The central element of the otherwise simple plot was how incompleteness is a tool for bias. In the film, four people give separate, drastically different accounts of a scene they all observed, the seduction (or rape) of a woman by a bandit, the bandit’s duel with her husband (if there was a duel), and the husband’s death (from losing the duel, murder, or suicide).

Akira Kurosawa deliberately used elements of perception and subjectivity to present conflicting versions of the same event through different characters in the storyline. This contradictory interpretation of the same event boggles the minds of the viewers because they are constantly trying to guess who is right and what actually happened.

The movie was a great commercial success and Akira’s insight — relativity of truth and the unreliability and inevitable subjectivity of the human memory — was recognized in the world outside the cinema also. The lawyers and judges commonly speak of The Rashomon Effect when first-hand witnesses give contradictory testimonies.

The Bollywood film Talvar — based on the 2008 Noida double murder case — used the Rashomon effect. The film depicts the investigation of the case from three different perspectives in which victims’s parents are either guilty or innocent of the murder charges by the police investigation, the first CBI probe and later an investigation by a different CBI team.

So why does this happen? Why do different people have such dramatically different accounts of the same event? Maybe they’re lying. That’s plausible but an easy explanation and pretty much useless in solving the problem. However, there’s another possibility.

Humans interpret any incident based on their own perceptions. Like those six blind men.

So, even when the incident is an independent event, what’s observed is modified by the observer’s mindset, experiences, and expectations. And when it comes to the recollection of the event, another distortion is layered by the memory. It is due to this that it becomes maddeningly hard to verify the truth based on narratives given by different people.

Morgan Housel, in his essay The Psychology of Money, writes —

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. If you were born in 1970 the stock market went up 10-fold adjusted for inflation in your teens and 20s – your young impressionable years when you were learning baseline knowledge about how investing and the economy work. If you were born in 1950, the same market went exactly nowhere in your teens and 20s.

When everyone has experienced a fraction of what’s out there but uses those experiences to explain everything they expect to happen, a lot of people eventually become disappointed, confused, or dumbfounded at others’ decisions. Keep that quote in mind when debating people’s investing views. Or when you’re confused about their desire to hoard or blow money, their fear or greed in certain situations, or whenever else you can’t understand why people do what they do with money. Things will make more sense.

Brushing aside disagreement with others with an assumption that others are misinformed or are stupid doesn’t help the situation. When you become curious about why others believe what they believe, you open up the possibility to unearth important information that might help you in updating your worldview and making better decisions.

Everyone’s watching a different movie, writes Housel, “Personal financial success is all relative measured against the amount of effort you put into it and the expectations you set for yourself. Both are different for everyone. What seems trivial to you might be the most important thing in the world to me, especially if we’re at different stages in life – low interest rates are great for young borrowers, but disastrous for retirees needing fixed income. We’re all coming from a different place with different perspectives, which explains why so many equally smart people in finance and economics disagree with each other. When you find something crazy in finance and ask yourself “Why is this happening?,” the answer is usually “because someone with a different perspective thinks it should.”

Duke writes —

Even without conflicting versions, the Rashomon Effect reminds us that we can’t assume one version of a story is accurate or complete. We can’t count on someone else to provide the other side of the story, or any individual’s version to provide a full and objective accounting of all the relevant information. When presenting a decision for discussion, we should be mindful of details we might be omitting and be extra-safe by adding anything that could possibly be relevant. On the evaluation side, we must query each other to extract those details when necessary.

The lesson here is that we should never be overconfident about one version of the truth, especially the one we believe in. Being adamant about our version of truth makes it hard for us to share information that could give others a chance to find flaws in our decision-making. And that would eventually lead to fooling ourselves. That’s why Richard Feynman observed that fooling ourselves is the easiest thing to do.

Commenting on scientific truth-seeking, Feynman said —

A kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results…

We have to realize that the elephant of reality hides in it a huge amount of information. And our cognitive abilities are limited and can never absorb all the details available at any given moment.

Reminds me of this intriguing quote from famous mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. He writes —

Within infinite myths lies the eternal truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes, Indra has a hundred, You and I, only two.

Which means we can never be sure of what we see as reality. However, being unsure doesn’t mean being indecisive. It means that this lack of surety is an opportunity to use it as a motivation to keep updating our hypothesis and acknowledge our fallibility so that the downside can be protected if our hypothesis turns out to be false.

Seeing the reality as it is may not make your life necessarily more comfortable. Most probably it won’t. But the idea of comfort itself is an illusion.

Anne writes —

In the movie, the matrix was built to be more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable…Giving that up is not the easiest choice. By choosing to exit the matrix, we are asserting that striving for a more objective representation of the world, even if it is uncomfortable at times, will make us happier and more successful in the long run.

Conclusion

The world’s smartest problem-solvers and decision-makers rely on a set of frameworks and mental models that help make decisions and separate good ideas from the bad.

These mental models help you perceive the reality in a manner which is closer to the truth. Once you learn these mental models, it becomes easy to change your own actions and avoid common traps.

A latticework of mental models assists you in interacting with the world with better results. Having these mental models in your head is like a bag of lego blocks which you can use to build your own decision-making framework and discover new insights on how the world really works.

The post Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[sunshineweb]

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect

The parable of six blind men and an elephant, goes like this —

When a group of blind men, who had never come across an elephant before, encounter the tusker for the first time, they try to conceptualize the animal by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one body part, such as the tail or the trunk. Then they discuss their understanding about the elephant.

The man who had touched the elephant’s side says, “It’s very much like a wall.”

The one who held the elephant’s tusk declares, “No! it’s like a smooth spear.”

“Not really. It’s like a python.” Claims the man who grabbed the trunk.

“You’re all mistaken.” shouts the man who got the elephant’s tail. “It’s like a thick rope.”

“I know we’re all blind but have you guys lost your mind also?” The fifth man who touched the animal’s ears says, “It’s like a big fan.”

“Come on, folks! What’s wrong with all of you?” Argues the sixth man who was leaning against the elephant’s knee, “It’s definitely like a tree.”

Image Source: John Godfre Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”

Who was right? In a way, everyone was right about what they perceived. At the same time, everyone was wrong about the elephant because their limited experience allowed them to figure out only a smaller chunk of reality in isolation.

The elephant in the fable is an apt metaphor for the complex problems we encounter in the real world. And who are those six blind men? Those are us — handicapped by our tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited, subjective experience.

The fable is a reminder of how our overconfidence divorces us from other’s viewpoint and makes us unwilling to accept the fact that those who disagree with us are also under the spell of the same bias — looking at the problem from a single dimension.

Anne Duke in her book Thinking in Bets writes —

We’ve all experienced situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives. This is known as Rashomon Effect, named for the 1950 cinematic classic Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa. The central element of the otherwise simple plot was how incompleteness is a tool for bias. In the film, four people give separate, drastically different accounts of a scene they all observed, the seduction (or rape) of a woman by a bandit, the bandit’s duel with her husband (if there was a duel), and the husband’s death (from losing the duel, murder, or suicide).

Akira Kurosawa deliberately used elements of perception and subjectivity to present conflicting versions of the same event through different characters in the storyline. This contradictory interpretation of the same event boggles the minds of the viewers because they are constantly trying to guess who is right and what actually happened.

The movie was a great commercial success and Akira’s insight — relativity of truth and the unreliability and inevitable subjectivity of the human memory — was recognized in the world outside the cinema also. The lawyers and judges commonly speak of The Rashomon Effect when first-hand witnesses give contradictory testimonies.

The Bollywood film Talvar — based on the 2008 Noida double murder case — used the Rashomon effect. The film depicts the investigation of the case from three different perspectives in which victims’s parents are either guilty or innocent of the murder charges by the police investigation, the first CBI probe and later an investigation by a different CBI team.

So why does this happen? Why do different people have such dramatically different accounts of the same event? Maybe they’re lying. That’s plausible but an easy explanation and pretty much useless in solving the problem. However, there’s another possibility.

Humans interpret any incident based on their own perceptions. Like those six blind men.

So, even when the incident is an independent event, what’s observed is modified by the observer’s mindset, experiences, and expectations. And when it comes to the recollection of the event, another distortion is layered by the memory. It is due to this that it becomes maddeningly hard to verify the truth based on narratives given by different people.

Morgan Housel, in his essay The Psychology of Money, writes —

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. If you were born in 1970 the stock market went up 10-fold adjusted for inflation in your teens and 20s – your young impressionable years when you were learning baseline knowledge about how investing and the economy work. If you were born in 1950, the same market went exactly nowhere in your teens and 20s.

When everyone has experienced a fraction of what’s out there but uses those experiences to explain everything they expect to happen, a lot of people eventually become disappointed, confused, or dumbfounded at others’ decisions. Keep that quote in mind when debating people’s investing views. Or when you’re confused about their desire to hoard or blow money, their fear or greed in certain situations, or whenever else you can’t understand why people do what they do with money. Things will make more sense.

Brushing aside disagreement with others with an assumption that others are misinformed or are stupid doesn’t help the situation. When you become curious about why others believe what they believe, you open up the possibility to unearth important information that might help you in updating your worldview and making better decisions.

Everyone’s watching a different movie, writes Housel, “Personal financial success is all relative measured against the amount of effort you put into it and the expectations you set for yourself. Both are different for everyone. What seems trivial to you might be the most important thing in the world to me, especially if we’re at different stages in life – low interest rates are great for young borrowers, but disastrous for retirees needing fixed income. We’re all coming from a different place with different perspectives, which explains why so many equally smart people in finance and economics disagree with each other. When you find something crazy in finance and ask yourself “Why is this happening?,” the answer is usually “because someone with a different perspective thinks it should.”

Duke writes —

Even without conflicting versions, the Rashomon Effect reminds us that we can’t assume one version of a story is accurate or complete. We can’t count on someone else to provide the other side of the story, or any individual’s version to provide a full and objective accounting of all the relevant information. When presenting a decision for discussion, we should be mindful of details we might be omitting and be extra-safe by adding anything that could possibly be relevant. On the evaluation side, we must query each other to extract those details when necessary.

The lesson here is that we should never be overconfident about one version of the truth, especially the one we believe in. Being adamant about our version of truth makes it hard for us to share information that could give others a chance to find flaws in our decision-making. And that would eventually lead to fooling ourselves. That’s why Richard Feynman observed that fooling ourselves is the easiest thing to do.

Commenting on scientific truth-seeking, Feynman said —

A kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results…

We have to realize that the elephant of reality hides in it a huge amount of information. And our cognitive abilities are limited and can never absorb all the details available at any given moment.

Reminds me of this intriguing quote from famous mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. He writes —

Within infinite myths lies the eternal truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes, Indra has a hundred, You and I, only two.

Which means we can never be sure of what we see as reality. However, being unsure doesn’t mean being indecisive. It means that this lack of surety is an opportunity to use it as a motivation to keep updating our hypothesis and acknowledge our fallibility so that the downside can be protected if our hypothesis turns out to be false.

Seeing the reality as it is may not make your life necessarily more comfortable. Most probably it won’t. But the idea of comfort itself is an illusion.

Anne writes —

In the movie, the matrix was built to be more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable…Giving that up is not the easiest choice. By choosing to exit the matrix, we are asserting that striving for a more objective representation of the world, even if it is uncomfortable at times, will make us happier and more successful in the long run.

Conclusion

The world’s smartest problem-solvers and decision-makers rely on a set of frameworks and mental models that help make decisions and separate good ideas from the bad.

These mental models help you perceive the reality in a manner which is closer to the truth. Once you learn these mental models, it becomes easy to change your own actions and avoid common traps.

A latticework of mental models assists you in interacting with the world with better results. Having these mental models in your head is like a bag of lego blocks which you can use to build your own decision-making framework and discover new insights on how the world really works.

The post Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[sunshineweb]

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect

The parable of six blind men and an elephant, goes like this —

When a group of blind men, who had never come across an elephant before, encounter the tusker for the first time, they try to conceptualize the animal by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one body part, such as the tail or the trunk. Then they discuss their understanding about the elephant.

The man who had touched the elephant’s side says, “It’s very much like a wall.”

The one who held the elephant’s tusk declares, “No! it’s like a smooth spear.”

“Not really. It’s like a python.” Claims the man who grabbed the trunk.

“You’re all mistaken.” shouts the man who got the elephant’s tail. “It’s like a thick rope.”

“I know we’re all blind but have you guys lost your mind also?” The fifth man who touched the animal’s ears says, “It’s like a big fan.”

“Come on, folks! What’s wrong with all of you?” Argues the sixth man who was leaning against the elephant’s knee, “It’s definitely like a tree.”

Image Source: John Godfre Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”

Who was right? In a way, everyone was right about what they perceived. At the same time, everyone was wrong about the elephant because their limited experience allowed them to figure out only a smaller chunk of reality in isolation.

The elephant in the fable is an apt metaphor for the complex problems we encounter in the real world. And who are those six blind men? Those are us — handicapped by our tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited, subjective experience.

The fable is a reminder of how our overconfidence divorces us from other’s viewpoint and makes us unwilling to accept the fact that those who disagree with us are also under the spell of the same bias — looking at the problem from a single dimension.

Anne Duke in her book Thinking in Bets writes —

We’ve all experienced situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives. This is known as Rashomon Effect, named for the 1950 cinematic classic Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa. The central element of the otherwise simple plot was how incompleteness is a tool for bias. In the film, four people give separate, drastically different accounts of a scene they all observed, the seduction (or rape) of a woman by a bandit, the bandit’s duel with her husband (if there was a duel), and the husband’s death (from losing the duel, murder, or suicide).

Akira Kurosawa deliberately used elements of perception and subjectivity to present conflicting versions of the same event through different characters in the storyline. This contradictory interpretation of the same event boggles the minds of the viewers because they are constantly trying to guess who is right and what actually happened.

The movie was a great commercial success and Akira’s insight — relativity of truth and the unreliability and inevitable subjectivity of the human memory — was recognized in the world outside the cinema also. The lawyers and judges commonly speak of The Rashomon Effect when first-hand witnesses give contradictory testimonies.

The Bollywood film Talvar — based on the 2008 Noida double murder case — used the Rashomon effect. The film depicts the investigation of the case from three different perspectives in which victims’s parents are either guilty or innocent of the murder charges by the police investigation, the first CBI probe and later an investigation by a different CBI team.

So why does this happen? Why do different people have such dramatically different accounts of the same event? Maybe they’re lying. That’s plausible but an easy explanation and pretty much useless in solving the problem. However, there’s another possibility.

Humans interpret any incident based on their own perceptions. Like those six blind men.

So, even when the incident is an independent event, what’s observed is modified by the observer’s mindset, experiences, and expectations. And when it comes to the recollection of the event, another distortion is layered by the memory. It is due to this that it becomes maddeningly hard to verify the truth based on narratives given by different people.

Morgan Housel, in his essay The Psychology of Money, writes —

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. If you were born in 1970 the stock market went up 10-fold adjusted for inflation in your teens and 20s – your young impressionable years when you were learning baseline knowledge about how investing and the economy work. If you were born in 1950, the same market went exactly nowhere in your teens and 20s.

When everyone has experienced a fraction of what’s out there but uses those experiences to explain everything they expect to happen, a lot of people eventually become disappointed, confused, or dumbfounded at others’ decisions. Keep that quote in mind when debating people’s investing views. Or when you’re confused about their desire to hoard or blow money, their fear or greed in certain situations, or whenever else you can’t understand why people do what they do with money. Things will make more sense.

Brushing aside disagreement with others with an assumption that others are misinformed or are stupid doesn’t help the situation. When you become curious about why others believe what they believe, you open up the possibility to unearth important information that might help you in updating your worldview and making better decisions.

Everyone’s watching a different movie, writes Housel, “Personal financial success is all relative measured against the amount of effort you put into it and the expectations you set for yourself. Both are different for everyone. What seems trivial to you might be the most important thing in the world to me, especially if we’re at different stages in life – low interest rates are great for young borrowers, but disastrous for retirees needing fixed income. We’re all coming from a different place with different perspectives, which explains why so many equally smart people in finance and economics disagree with each other. When you find something crazy in finance and ask yourself “Why is this happening?,” the answer is usually “because someone with a different perspective thinks it should.”

Duke writes —

Even without conflicting versions, the Rashomon Effect reminds us that we can’t assume one version of a story is accurate or complete. We can’t count on someone else to provide the other side of the story, or any individual’s version to provide a full and objective accounting of all the relevant information. When presenting a decision for discussion, we should be mindful of details we might be omitting and be extra-safe by adding anything that could possibly be relevant. On the evaluation side, we must query each other to extract those details when necessary.

The lesson here is that we should never be overconfident about one version of the truth, especially the one we believe in. Being adamant about our version of truth makes it hard for us to share information that could give others a chance to find flaws in our decision-making. And that would eventually lead to fooling ourselves. That’s why Richard Feynman observed that fooling ourselves is the easiest thing to do.

Commenting on scientific truth-seeking, Feynman said —

A kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results…

We have to realize that the elephant of reality hides in it a huge amount of information. And our cognitive abilities are limited and can never absorb all the details available at any given moment.

Reminds me of this intriguing quote from famous mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. He writes —

Within infinite myths lies the eternal truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes, Indra has a hundred, You and I, only two.

Which means we can never be sure of what we see as reality. However, being unsure doesn’t mean being indecisive. It means that this lack of surety is an opportunity to use it as a motivation to keep updating our hypothesis and acknowledge our fallibility so that the downside can be protected if our hypothesis turns out to be false.

Seeing the reality as it is may not make your life necessarily more comfortable. Most probably it won’t. But the idea of comfort itself is an illusion.

Anne writes —

In the movie, the matrix was built to be more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable…Giving that up is not the easiest choice. By choosing to exit the matrix, we are asserting that striving for a more objective representation of the world, even if it is uncomfortable at times, will make us happier and more successful in the long run.

Conclusion

The world’s smartest problem-solvers and decision-makers rely on a set of frameworks and mental models that help make decisions and separate good ideas from the bad.

These mental models help you perceive the reality in a manner which is closer to the truth. Once you learn these mental models, it becomes easy to change your own actions and avoid common traps.

A latticework of mental models assists you in interacting with the world with better results. Having these mental models in your head is like a bag of lego blocks which you can use to build your own decision-making framework and discover new insights on how the world really works.

The post Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/