“Let your voice be heard. Don’t stand idly by and let things happen to you. Question everything; be informed.”—Madeline Brewer
THE ELEPHANT WHO LOST HIS IDENTITY
Captive elephants don’t know their own strength. When they’re young, their owner wraps a chain around their leg and connects it to a tree. The young elephant proceeds to try its hardest to detach from the chain, but fails over and over again. Eventually, they give up.
As the elephant grows older, larger, and stronger, they continue to believe the chain around their ankle is their limited physical boundary. The idea becomes so ingrained in their belief system that even when their owners chain them to a small plank of wood they don’t try to break free, even though they easily could.
The elephant is completely unaware of their own potential. They don’t know the power they truly hold. Just as the captive elephant operates on a foundation of lies, chances are, you are too.
RAISED IN CHAINS
Richard Wurman, the TED Talk founder, suggests, “In school, we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.” We don’t teach kids methods of how to think about the world around them. Instead, kids accept what they learn from their parents, environment, and emotional responses as factual learnings. As they grow older and life fills with complexity, they rely on these ‘factual’ learnings for understanding. This influences them to transform their learnings into permanent ideas, biases, prejudices, and practices. Unfortunately, most people go their whole lifetime without successfully escaping these frameworks. The key to unlocking these chains is learning how to ask the right questions.
SHOULD YOU TRUST MASS JUDGMENT?
Imagine this scenario: One hundred witnesses are asked to point out a robber from several suspects in a police lineup. Would you agree that the case is closed if all one hundred witnesses select the same suspect? If your answer is “Yes,” I’m sorry to break it to you, but you would most likely be wrong. Statistics prove there’s a higher chance that the selected person is innocent. As the group of unanimously-agreeing witnesses increases, the probability of them being correct decreases until it is no more valid than a random guess. This phenomenon is the paradox of unanimity.
The Bayesian analysis is the mathematical reasoning behind this paradox. To understand the Bayesian analysis, let’s look at flipping a coin. When you flip a coin, you know it has about a 50% chance to land on either heads or tails. But imagine if you flip the coin one hundred times, and it lands on heads every time. You’d instantly know that something is wrong. Similarly, getting a large group of witnesses to unanimously vote on one robber is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, it’s more likely that something went wrong.
To understand how the paradox relates to your journey of questioning everything, let’s explore how it applies to society. Does it mean we should discredit every popular opinion? Not exactly. For simple, easy-to-understand questions, it makes sense for humans to unanimously choose the correct answer. For example, suppose the witnesses had to pick a strawberry out of a lineup of blueberries. In that case, the ease of this task makes the unanimous decision more reliable. But as the complexity of the question increases, the mass consensus becomes more unreliable.
The key here is understanding that the paradox doesn’t strictly apply to complete unanimity. A unanimous vote is rare, while a majority vote is common. This paradox applies to both cases because the effect increases as the group consensus increases. Widespread consensus touches a large part of society, including politics, entertainment, business, and religion. When asking yourself tough questions, don’t simply fall in line with the majority. Go out and seek answers for yourself first. The more complex the question, the more uncertain society is. The more uncertain a group of people are, the more varied their opinions should be. When faced with a mass-adopted view, research and question it yourself first. There’s a high probability the majority doesn’t even know they’re wrong.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE OPEN-MINDED?
The definition of reality is the state of things as they actually exist, instead of an idealistic view of them. On the other hand, perception is how we use our senses and mind to focus on, process, recall, explain, comprehend, make decisions about, and act on reality. Perceiving is something you do throughout your life. Eventually, your perceptions become the only baseline you have to define reality.