Desires: Share or Keep?

لیک گفتی: گرچه می دانم سرت ... زود هم پیدا کن بر ظاهرت
چون براورد از میان جان خروش ... اندر آمد بحر بخشایش به جوش

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گورخانه راز تو چون دل شود ... آن مرادت زودتر حاصل شود
گفت پیغمبر که هر که سر نهفت ... زود گردد با مراد خویش جفت

- هر دو از داستان کنیرک و شاه، مثنوی مولوی

Decisions: Absolute or Relative?

Which of the following orange circles is larger?

You’d probably say: “Yeah, yeah, I know. They are equal, but the right one looks larger because it’s surrounded by smaller circles.”

You’re right. But, did you know that logical illusions, similar to the above visual illusion, lead us towards wrong decisions in our daily life? Let's look at a classic example from Dan Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational.

The following two options are presented to people who are interested in The Economist articles:

- The Economist subscription to access website: $59/year
- The Economist subscription to paper edition and website: $120/year

Experiments show that the ratio of people who selected the second option sharply increases when the following option (called decoy) is added to the list:

- The Economist subscription to paper edition: $120/year

Why? Here is the answer: In the first scenario, people are forced to decide in absolute terms: “Do I usually read articles online, or on paper? Do I really need both?” In the second scenario, the added option provides people with an opportunity to decide relatively: “oh, look at options 2 and 3. Definitely, option 2 is a sweet deal!”

In this example, the decoy has the same role as the small blue circles surrounding the orange circle on the right to make it look bigger (more valuable).

When a decision-maker is incapable of evaluating the real value of an option, he takes the relative decision making shortcut. On the other hand, we can achieve high quality decisions by taking some more time to take out the noise - wipe out the blue circles - and evaluate options in absolute terms. This way, we keep the relative decision making for the situation where saving time is more important than the quality of the decision.

Now, imagine how lame the decisions would be in an environment where most of decision-makers are using relative decisions. A good example is the stock market. The trading decisions are all logical; however, the logic is usually used to find out how much a stock values compared to other stocks which, ironically, are evaluated by the same logic! Few traders evaluate the stock itself – Most people are distracted by blue circles instead of concentrating on orange centers.

Unconditional or Conditional?

منگر اندر ما، مکن در ما نظر ... اندر اکرام و سخای خود نگر
- مولوی

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طفل را گر نان دهی بر جای شیر ... طفل مسکین را از نان، مرده گیر
چون که دندانها برآرد بعد از آن ... هم به خود، طالب شود آن طفل نان
مرغ پر نارسته چون پران شود ... لقمه هر گربه دران شود
چون برارد پر، بپرد او به خود ... بی تکلف، بی صفیر نیک و بد
- مولوی

یکی‌ را که خواهی‌ نماییش مهر ... بزرگیش جز پایه پایه منه
اگر بی‌ حسابش بزرگی‌ دهی‌ ... نه‌ ارج تو دارد نه‌ قدر مهی
- فردوسی

Persevere or Revenge?

Imagine a person who is truly faithful to her partner and being faithful is a core value in her belief system. However, her partner turns out to be cheating on her. Three scenarios are imaginable for this person who’s been hurt by being cheated on:

1. Witnessed and experienced the pain that occurs to a cheated partner, this person discovers being faithful more valuable than even before. Therefore, she not only perseveres being faithful, but also puts it into action more rigorously and responsibly. This scenario requires this person to have high personal integrity and act consciously.

2. The pain of being cheated on is so deep and intense that this person finds revenge as the only way to overcome the pain. When the cheating partner is not accessible, this person replicates the cheating on her next partner to ease the pain on herself by feeling “even” inside.

3. The third scenario is the extreme case of the second one. In this case, the pain is so severe that the person urges to protect herself from any sort of such pains in the future. Not to go through the pain of being cheated again, she turns to a cheating partner herself. It’s similar to “escape forward” strategy: The act of moving forward misrepresents proactive act of victory; however, it’s indeed a passive act of escape.

Unlike the first scenario, the second and third scenarios are probably chosen, consciously or unconsciously, by weaker personalities who lack a solid belief/value system. The deviation of the action (cheating) from the internal value (being faithful) causes internal irritation, which tends to be reduced by this group of people by different justification mechanisms: “everyone does it”, “don’t be such a naïve”, “let’s be real”, “be smart and mature”, etc. The level of deviation from the values is closely related to the level of pain we experience.

This mechanism of breaking our values to protect ourselves from pain and regrets can be also traced in many other situations. For example, if a seller lies or hides the defects of merchandise, we may not hesitate to do the same thing to others when we sell it later although this behavior is against our values.

Traditional or Modern Society?

Which one is more valuable?

1. Your friend sends you a birthday note because:
a) S/he remembers it, or
b) S/he has entered hundreds of names and their birth dates into a system, and set the system to alert the birthdays.

2. Your friend wishes you a happy new year by:
a) Calling you or writing you a letter/email, or
b) Sending you one of those fit-for-all Happy New Year emails.

3. A couple gets married because:
a) They simply love each other, or
b) They make a decision that is polluted with an unlimited list of desires, likes, and dislikes, which are shaped by ever-changing criteria.

4. A couple is separated and the son is living with his mother. The father pays for the son’s education because:
a) He cares about the future of his son, or
b) He’s obligated by the law to pay for his son’s education expenses.

5. A white guy hangs out with a black guy because:
a) The two guys are truly connecting as friends, or
b) It’s in rhythm with anti-racism culture and laws, which helps both sides to survive in the society.

And the list can continue for ever …

We benefit from a modern society by all its technology and law enforcement features; however, it also destroys many meaningful values and attitudes inhabiting in a traditional society, or replaces them with shallow or worthless ones.

So, once again, instead of the 2-way lousy solution of "either keep all the old values, or totally replace them with new ones", we need to get to know both sides thoroughly to find the third solution: Refine our values by keeping the good-old ones, and replace the bad-old with good-new ones.

Gut Feeling or Rational Thinking?

Think of a golf player. To make a good shot, a series of decisions (sweep strength, ball hitting point, direction, etc.) should be made based on some pieces of information (distance, topography, wind, etc.). A professional player is much better off if he follows his intuitions to sweep the club. On the other hand, an amateur player has to go through every step of analyzing the situation and his movements; otherwise, he may even not hit the ball!

Gut feeling and rational thinking are two powerful decision making tools that are required to be correctly understood to be properly applied to the related situations. Some people are so in love with fastness, easiness, and “coolness” of making decisions based on their gut feelings that they forget about its underlying limitations, while some other people immerse themselves in analysis so deep that they cannot recognize that they may have selected an inefficient and erroneous decision making tool.

Gut feeling is not a magic, gifted talent, chance, or the result of an extraordinary IQ. It is a smart recognition and decision making tool that is trained based on rational thinking. When we practice a series of logical analysis regularly for a long period, the procedure is programmed in our unconsciousness. After a while, we can take advantage of the “shortcuts” provided by an expert system (gut feeling) that is deeply trained over time.

Most analytical people don’t rely on their intuitions because they believe they need to spend a reasonable amount of time on some sort of analysis to reach a good decision. They are not aware that gut feeling automatically applies the most efficient and accurate analysis based on its years of training. The training might be conscious (a sport player), unconscious (the effect of environment) or even transferred from generations (evolution).

Located in unconsciousness, gut feeling automatically includes factors such as internalized values and feelings in decision making process. Rational thinking, on the other hand, may miss counting in these factors due to high concentration on analyzing information. Such ignorance may lead to regrets and unhappiness later after making a choice when the dust settles down and the ignored long-term existed values start to show up.

I think there is only one, but major drawback with gut feelings: We may make disastrous decisions if we overestimate the training, and thus, correctness of our gut feelings.

ReAlItY or rEaLiTy?

Imagine that “ReAlItY” and “rEaLiTy” are written on a paper and presented to a person with no knowledge of English language and Latin alphabets. Lacking the knowledge, the person considers the “forms” as the only source of information; thus, assumes that the two words have different meanings. On the other hand, a knowledgeable person knows that, despite differences in forms, the two words refer to the same concept.

To perceive higher levels of reality, we need to gain more knowledge, which I think, requires us to make it to a level that we can recognize the similarities beyond the “forms”.

To elaborate above statement, let me explain the two steps that, I think, are required to take us from the state of no-knowledge to ultimate-knowledge. We gain knowledge through investigating differences in the first step, and similarities in the second step.

Step 1- Separation: Transition from oneness to forms
Think of a new born baby as an example of the state of no-knowledge. The baby perceives the whole world as “one” entity – she sees no differences, say, between people and objects. However, after a while, the baby extends her knowledge by differentiating people from objects; her mother from other people; and her bottle of milk from other objects. It’s a recursive process that continuously separates items based on their differences, creates new forms, and shapes a knowledgebase of categorized forms. So far so good! But here is a problem: Sometimes we’re so busy with counting the leaves that we miss the tree; we’re so involved with the forms that we miss their roots and underlying similarities.

Step 2- Unity: Transition from forms to oneness
Now, think of knowledgeable people, distinguished in recent, say, century. We know that each branch of knowledge (science, art, religion, etc.) has been divided to uncountable number of sub-disciplines (“forms”); however, most of such eminent people are recognized due to their multi-disciplinary achievements. For example, Albert Einstein’s discoveries are cited in fields of physics and mathematics as well as philosophy. Observation of such trends, I think, suggests that the second step of extending knowledge requires another approach: Uniting forms by discovering their underlying similarities. Applying this procedure recursively, the ultimate knowledge is achieved when there are no forms anymore; the world of forms transcends to the world of oneness.

I think that Yin-Yang symbol brilliantly illustrates the concepts of separation and unity. At the first glance, we see the world of forms where black is separated from white. Looking deeper, we recognize the world of oneness where black and white are united. It also shows that oneness is not possible unless the forms correctly interrelate.