Three colourful ideas

Puedes leer la versión en español de esta entrada aquí.

Idea 1: the red car

A few weeks ago, I decided to have some beers with some of my best friends. It was aThursday evening and since I’m getting older, a couple of beers already give me a bit of a hangover and, therefore, a slow Friday morning. This semester I teach on Fridays a bit early for me, so naturally, I was running late. In Ljubljana, the city where I live, it’s very easy to get around by bike, and although the faculty where I teach is on the other side of the city, the bike is still my default transport.

Anyway, I was late an riding on a small street in the center. The bike traffic light changed from green to red about two meters before I reached the corner. There wasn’t a single car, and I thought it would be easy to run the red light. At the next corner, a police car stopped me because they noticed I ran the red light. As I do every day, I was riding my bike listening to a podcast (it’s forbidden to use headphones), and according to the officer, I was also riding without hands; I don’t remember this last part, but it wouldn’t surprise me, it was a bit cold. Long story short, I got a 320 EUR fine. I deserved it, that’s not up for discussion.

That same afternoon, when I was heading back home (without headphones and very carefully), I counted at least 8 people using over-ear headphones while riding bikes. If we add to these all those wearing earbuds and all those I didn’t see, I dare say that a most people bike with headphones but almost nobody gets fined. This made me a little angry.

Then it also made me remember an idea I read about long time ago, the red car phenomenon. If on a random day I ask you, “How many red cars have you seen?”, most likely you wouldn’t know what to answer, but you probably wouldn’t think you saw too many (because you would have noticed). However, if today I tell you that tomorrow night I’m going to ask you how many red cars you saw during the day, you’ll probably pay much more attention to every red car you see. Moreover, you might be left with the impression that there were too many red cars in the city that particular day. In reality, the number of red cars we encounter on any average day probably changes very little; there’s no reason why we would see more red cars on Friday than on Thursday.

In many aspects of our lives, we react the same way: our personal context makes us imagine that things happening around us are in alignments with what we expect to happen. Just like me noticing that many people use headphones. This phenomenon becomes particularly dangerous when the red cars in our life are problems, people who treat us badly, difficulties at work, stress… If we focus on counting these red cars, we’re likely to start thinking we have a pretty messed up life, when the truth is that, barring specific circumstances, we probably have a pretty okay life. Moreover, if you have the freedom to be reading a mathematician’s blog who decided to tell you about getting how he got fined, chances are you have a life with some comforts, so don’t worry too much about your red cars.

Idea 2: the blue dot

This is an idea that somewhat generalises the previous one. In my case, I first read about it in one of Mark Manson’s books. If you, dear reader, don’t know him, I really invite you to check out his content. I confess to being a bit of a fanboy of this guy, or perhaps in more professional words, I should say many of his ideas align with mine.

Back to the blue dot. This is a colloquial way to refer to a phenomenon known as prevalence-induced concept change. In more mundane words, this phenomenon explains why, despite most of us living in more or less stable environments with mostly everything working working out (if not permanently, at least in some particular instances of our life), we continue thinking that life is hard. Even if this isn’t your case, you probably don’t have to look far to find examples of people who make you think “this person has everything going for them and still lives stressed out.”

The study behind the phenomenon goes something like this: a group of people was asked to identify blue dots (or rather, circles) within a family of several dots whose color varied between different shades of purple, blue, and green. After a while, the number of blue dots shown decreased, however, people started deciding that some purple dots were blue; dots that at the beginning of the experiment weren’t thought of as blue. In other words, their notion of which dots were blue expanded when the number of dots that were actually blue was reduced.

This study was generalised to the following situation: people were shown some faces and asked to identify those that looked unfriendly or threatening. The result was the same: over time, the faces that people chose as threatening at the beginning of the experiment started appearing less frequently, and then people began choosing faces they hadn’t chosen at the start of the experiment. Their notion of when a face represented a threat expanded in the absence of faces that represented a threat at the beginning.

The phenomenon isn’t just visual; the same phenomenon occurred when people were asked to decide when a situation was immoral/unethical. At first, when there were abundant unethical situations, people are usually very good at deciding. As the number of these decreased, people began to label as unethical situations they would have let pass in the past.

This also happens with our problems: the fewer problems or difficult situations we have in our life, we tend to redefine what difficult or challenging means to us. In more mundane words: the easier we have it, the easier we panic about what happens around us. I must confess that this phenomenon is one of the ones I’ve noticed most when comparing the daily life of the average Mexican against the daily life of the average Slovenian. These folks often drown in problems that many people in my country face daily (And I’m very glad it’s that way!).

In order to keep the text as short as possible, here’s a link to a video where Mark Manson talks about this phenomenon and to the original study.

Idea 3: the red paperclip

I’ll be brief on this one. In 2005, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald became famous on the internet. Kyle began his story with a red paperclip, which he traded for a fish-shaped pen. After this, he traded the pen for something else, and with time and after a couple dozen trades, Kyle culminated his chain of exchanges with a house. That is, Kyle traded, in many steps, a red paperclip for a house.

How did he do it? Well, truthfully, with a lot of luck. However, beyond the reasons why the trades happened, the key in the process is that in each of his steps, the object he received represented a small gain compared to the object he gave away.

How does the red paperclip connect with the other two ideas? Well, I don’t know if my connection will seem a bit weak, but one of the beliefs I hold today is that it’s impossible to live a problem-free life. Something will always happen, and even when our life objectively improves, the blue dot phenomenon ensures that we will continue finding problems in our life. Moreover, I consider that every decision we make represents an exchange of problems, e.g., when we decide to go to the gym, we are deciding to endure muscle pain and the effort required, in exchange for improving our health (and avoiding the problems that come with being in poor physical condition).

Assuming these principles, I think the red paperclip can give us a strategy to take it easier: if throughout our life we will never stop having problems, maybe we should focus a good part of our energy on ensuring that the problems we receive are better, or align better with our values and principles, than the problems we’re letting go.

Here’s a link to the original red paperclip story.