Memory And The Art Of Building Narratives

When we take away the mind's impositions, restrictions, boundaries and the preset rules of how things should be, we can relook, dismantle and reform anything including how numbers and letters are represented or structured.

• Number structures and counting systems have several advantages and disadvantages, and not all minds think in the same way when dealing with abstract concepts.
• Getting stuck on something is a boon, as it takes us towards the first principles, of what we are essentially trying to achieve.

According to the theory of the spiral of silence, our desire to fit in with others means we will speak up if we think our opinion will be popular, or avoid expressing an opinion if it is unpopular.

The feedback loop means each time someone voices a popular opinion, the positive feedback from the group reinforces the feeling that it is safe to do so. Conversely, receiving a negative response for a divergent opinion will strengthen the view that they should avoid expressing it.

1. The result of the spiral of silence is that few will publicly voice a minority opinion and will instead will nurse it in private.
2. The possibility of conflict makes us less likely to voice any opinion. If we want to know what people think, we need to remove the possibility of negative consequences.
3. When we see a sudden change in mainstream opinions, it can be because of a shift in what is acceptable to express, not what people really think.
4. Highly vocal people of a minority opinion can make their views seem far more prevalent and acceptable than they really are.

When two event are interconnected, the former happening increases or decreases the probability of the latter happening.

• Your car insurance gets more expensive after an accident because car accidents are not independent events. A person who gets in one is more likely to get into another in the future.
• Most of our plans don’t go as we’d like. We get delayed, we have to backtrack, we have to make unexpected changes. Sometimes we think we can compensate for a delay in one part of a plan by moving faster later on. But the parts of a plan are not independent. A delay in one area makes delays elsewhere more likely as problems compound and accumulate.

In Naked Statistics, Charles Wheelan explains: “A different kind of mistake occurs when events that are independent are not treated as such . . . If you flip a fair coin 1,000,000 times and get 1,000,000 heads in a row, the probability of getting heads on the next flip is still 1/2. The very definition of statistical independence between two events is that the outcome of one has no effect on the outcome of another.”