July 20, 2010

  • Nothing Is Lost

    So I was reading this book called Black Swan. At the beginning I thought it was a the original script for the upcoming psycho-thriller of the same title directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman, but upon purchase I found out the book was really about a collection of theories and analogies about human's delusions about predicting the future, as the theme displays out:

    "Before a black swan is spotted by men, all swans were deemed white by default."

    One of the analogies I favor in this book is about the Beginner's Luck Phenomenon, which is widely accepted and acknowledged among Casino-goers. The idea behind Beginner's Luck is that most gamblers tend to have better luck at the games at earlier stages of their gambling career.

    The problem in how our mind works is that we like to see sure things and capture the security of solidity - we like to make sense out of things that are happening to us, therefore we unconciously ignore the things that did not happen to us, and sometimes it can lead us to a degree of serious troubles.

    To illustrate the problem as told from the book, take Beginnger's Luck Phenomenon for example, the real reason why Beginner's Luck is accepted by Casino goers goes by the following:

    Consider two groups of people: A and B, each gambling for the first time, let's suppose that all of group A win for the very first bet, whereas group B loses for the first time. Group A is very likely to continue betting, while group B becomes hesitant, and very likely to stop betting and gambling in the future.

    While group A may continue to be lucky with their bets, as we all know Casinos aren't really in the giving-away-all-their-money business, plus gambling is really a game of chance, so surely subsequent bets placed by group A will be losing hands. BUT, group A, the remaining players will more than likely to remember that at the beginning of their games, their hands were mostly winning and definitely pleasant - while group B is not likely to continue gambling, given their bad experiene for the first time - as a result, Beginner's Luck becomes accepted among active gamblers, who are probably mostly belong to group A.

    This analogy to me was quite an eye opener, because if we apply this problem with how our mind works, we will get to see that NOBODY ever cares about the life and deeds of the failures. We as people like to feel reassured about things that happened, things that are positive and good, and give justifications to it. The things that did not happen are filtered through our cognitive process and really don't raise questions and doubts.

    We will always be interested in reading biographies of Bill Gates or ________(Insert someone famous), never somebody who is living on a $20K salary for the rest of his life, while we pay attention to the traits of the successful people such as pasisonate, hardworking, or daring; but we seldom consider that the the failed may also have had the same exact quality, but failed.

    Doctors will want to examine "sure signs" of a symptoms before he can diagnose a possible disease/ailment, if a doctor sees an unusual lump in a person body, it becomes a sign of cancer, in another words, if a doctor DOES NOT see any unusual lump in a person's body, the person is FREE OF cancer - which in some cases can be a dangerous way to tell the health level of a person.

    Well, I find myself to feel a little bit happier having accepted this analogy, for those of you who don't know, I am that guy who continues betting even though I definitely belong to group B; I never understood the Beginner's Luck, always thought it was a superstition.

    Sometimes we chase after things and certainties we set up for ourselves then find ourselves being nowhere, even when we aren't really sure what will happen, the world is simply unpredictable, what we have is the sole belief in ourselves that we can make it. But even when we don't get to that place of certainty, don't let that bring us down, nothing is lost, it's just that sometimes we focus too much on certain things.