How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams Page B
Authors: Scott Adams
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to accommodate her. The interesting thing is that I’m not sure she understands that it’s my choice whether I go play with her or not. Her mental control of me works so reliably that I’m certain she thinks all that matters is how hard she stares at me and how vividly she imagines † herself chasing a tennis ball.
To me, the fascinating thing about Snickers’s flawed view of the world is that it works perfectly. She has a system for getting what shewants, and it
seems
to work, albeit for different reasons than she imagines. The deeper reality is that I’ve learned that her stares mean it’s time for some tennis-ball fun. My experience with Snickers begs a bigger question: Are humans so different from dogs in terms of having totally flawed assumptions about reality, and do our flawed assumptions work for reasons we don’t understand?
Athletes are known to stop shaving for the duration of a tournament or to wear socks they deem lucky. These superstitions probably help in some small way to bolster their confidence, which in turn can influence success. It’s irrelevant that lucky socks aren’t a real thing. The socks can still improve an athlete’s performance, even if the wearer has a flawed idea of why.
Our brains have a limited capacity to know the true nature of reality. Most times our misconceptions about reality are benign and sometimes, even helpful. Other times, not so much.
Physicists tell us that reality seems to depend on the observer. If you and I were to move through an empty and infinitely large universe at the same speed and in the same direction, we would feel as if we weren’t moving at all. And arguably, that would be the case, since movement only makes sense in relation to other objects. If you and I strap identical rockets to our backs in this otherwise empty universe, face the same direction and fire them up, it would be a matter of debate whether we were moving. You’d feel the rocket press into your back, but you wouldn’t know if that was the beginning of forward momentum or just a pressure on your back that relaxed after some time. (Okay, okay, a pressure on your body in space will always cause movement, and you’re smart enough to know that. But let’s assume for this example that you didn’t pay attention in science class.)
Reality outside the quantum world of particles and waves might be fixed and objective, at least according to most scientists. But how we think of our reality is clearly subject to regular changes. We’ve all had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and having a wildly inaccurate first impression, which in turn drives the way we act. Later, once you know more about the person, you start behaving differently. The external reality doesn’t change, but your point of view does. In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.
Forover a decade I’ve been semifamous for creating
Dilbert,
but I’m still generally unrecognized in public. When I meet people for the first time without the benefit of a full introduction, I’m treated like any other stranger. But if the topic of my job comes up, people immediately become friendlier, as if we had been friends forever. The underlying reality doesn’t change, but the way people think of me does, and that changes how they act.
My main point about perceptions is that you shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway. If I had to bet my life, I’d say humans are more like my dog trying to use psychic powers on me to play fetch than we are like enlightened creatures that understand their environment at a deep level. Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it.
To me, the fascinating thing about Snickers’s flawed view of the world is that it works perfectly. She has a system for getting what shewants, and it
seems
to work, albeit for different reasons than she imagines. The deeper reality is that I’ve learned that her stares mean it’s time for some tennis-ball fun. My experience with Snickers begs a bigger question: Are humans so different from dogs in terms of having totally flawed assumptions about reality, and do our flawed assumptions work for reasons we don’t understand?
Athletes are known to stop shaving for the duration of a tournament or to wear socks they deem lucky. These superstitions probably help in some small way to bolster their confidence, which in turn can influence success. It’s irrelevant that lucky socks aren’t a real thing. The socks can still improve an athlete’s performance, even if the wearer has a flawed idea of why.
Our brains have a limited capacity to know the true nature of reality. Most times our misconceptions about reality are benign and sometimes, even helpful. Other times, not so much.
Physicists tell us that reality seems to depend on the observer. If you and I were to move through an empty and infinitely large universe at the same speed and in the same direction, we would feel as if we weren’t moving at all. And arguably, that would be the case, since movement only makes sense in relation to other objects. If you and I strap identical rockets to our backs in this otherwise empty universe, face the same direction and fire them up, it would be a matter of debate whether we were moving. You’d feel the rocket press into your back, but you wouldn’t know if that was the beginning of forward momentum or just a pressure on your back that relaxed after some time. (Okay, okay, a pressure on your body in space will always cause movement, and you’re smart enough to know that. But let’s assume for this example that you didn’t pay attention in science class.)
Reality outside the quantum world of particles and waves might be fixed and objective, at least according to most scientists. But how we think of our reality is clearly subject to regular changes. We’ve all had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and having a wildly inaccurate first impression, which in turn drives the way we act. Later, once you know more about the person, you start behaving differently. The external reality doesn’t change, but your point of view does. In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.
Forover a decade I’ve been semifamous for creating
Dilbert,
but I’m still generally unrecognized in public. When I meet people for the first time without the benefit of a full introduction, I’m treated like any other stranger. But if the topic of my job comes up, people immediately become friendlier, as if we had been friends forever. The underlying reality doesn’t change, but the way people think of me does, and that changes how they act.
My main point about perceptions is that you shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway. If I had to bet my life, I’d say humans are more like my dog trying to use psychic powers on me to play fetch than we are like enlightened creatures that understand their environment at a deep level. Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it.
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