3 Timeless Folktales To Make You A Better Thinker
These old folk short stories are simply braingasmic…
“No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
I am going to present a cliche.
Thinking. is. hard.
That’s weird, right? Because thinking seems so natural just like breathing or swallowing or blinking…
But to be honest, thinking is nothing like that. In fact, it’s more like learning to play the piano or developing the habit of waking up early.
That is why it’s so important to constantly work out and exercise our thinking muscles from time to time…
Consider these three old and popular folktales that can help in that regard since they are such good brain gyming devices.
Story 1) The Frog In The Well
This folk story probably originated in ancient China and it goes something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a frog who lived happily in the ocean.
One day he ended up in a well where he met another frog.
Let’s call the other frog the well-frog.
The well-frog asked the ocean frog ‘Where do you come from?
The ocean frog replied, ‘From the ocean.’
Out of curiosity, the well-frog asked, ‘Is it bigger than this well?’
‘Yes of course’ the ocean frog replied.
The well-frog got really curious. He asked, ‘how big is the ocean?’
The ocean frog said, ‘Very big. So big that it is difficult to measure.’
To which the well-frog said that, ‘I will give you some measure so you can tell me’
The well-frog then jumped to one-quarter of the well and said ‘is it this big?’
‘No, way bigger than that’ the ocean frog replied.
The well-frog then jumped to the half of the well, ‘is it this big?’
‘No dummy. Way bigger than that’ the ocean frog replied.
Then the well-frog jumped to the whole length of the well and said, ‘it can’t be bigger than this one?’
The ocean frog said, ‘Well, I hate to break it to you but it is way way bigger than that…’
That was the whole story in a nutshell.
Now the key thing to notice in this story is that the well-frog can’t imagine how big an ocean is no matter how hard it tries since the well-frog has never seen the outside world. It’s ‘world’ is confined to the small well in which it lives. That is basically its whole universe aka its bubble beyond which it can’t perceive.
If you think about it, this story is primarily about perception and the limits of knowledge.
You know Edward De Bono, a famous psychologist of thinking once said that most mistakes in thinking are a result of inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes in logic.
This can’t be more true.
Sure the philosophers ask us to look out for **logical fallacies** and errors in reasoning. But there is another kind of mistake in thinking that people like you and me make — **the mistake of perception ****that is gravely responsible for more than half of our thinking crimes.
Humans just like the well-frog are myopic creatures with a limited sense of view beyond which they can’t see no matter how smart, or logical, or rational they may be. They possess blindspots outside their bubbles which are really hard to overcome. In other words, they live in their own little wells. These wells are often the result of our upbringing, our parents, teachers, media, religion, culture, politics…or simply our biology.
A literal blindspot. Look at the cross with your right eye keeping left eye close. Then move physically closer to the screen. Around 10–14 inches from the screen, the black dot should disappear.
If you think about it, is not the entire human history has been a history about human blindspots? About the mistakes in human perception? In ancient times, people who lived on the islands thought that they were the only inhabitants of the earth. It was only after the invention of ships that they came across other people from other continents and civilizations.
Then, in medieval times, people thought that the sun revolved around the sun and we can’t blame them because surely it “looks” that way until Gallileo showed that it was the other way around.
Then in modern times, people thought that there was only our galaxy in the entire universe until Edwin Hubble in 1919, showed that there were others, in fact, millions and billions of others, and ours was just a teeny-tiny one in the vast fabric of the universe.
In all these examples, the common denominator has been our limited sense of view A.K.A our inability to look and think beyond our own self and our immediate surroundings just like the well-frog.
This is not just true for our physical worlds but personal and political worlds as well.
Just a few decades ago, the phrase “all men are created equal” included some men and not others. It included men and not women.
We have literally come from well to the lake to the ocean in our understanding of the physical, personal and political worlds all because we learned to think beyond our perception.
Today, we might laugh at our ignorance but the truth is that even at this very moment, we possess the same mental machinery, the same brain Legos, the same perceptual and cognitive gap holes that made all those mistakes in history.
This means that we are as prone to our blindspots as our ancestors were thousands of years ago.
This is scary.
You know this frog story reminds me of one of the most scary thought experiments in philosophy, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
In the allegory, there is a cave with a few prisoners who have never seen the outside world just like the well frog. All they know about the outside world comes from the shadows on the cave wall which they mistake for the real world.
It’s only when one of the prisoners escapes the cave and ventures outside that he really comes to know know what the outside world looks like. Before that, the prisoner has no way to tell whether what he is seeing is illusion or the real deal. Just like the well-frog has no way to tell that it’s in the small well and not in the ocean.
I think the frog story as well as the cave allegory eaches us a monumental lesson.
To always doubt ourselves, never be certain, and stay humble in our outlook of the world because we are never sure if we are in the well or in the ocean, the cave or the real world. Humbleness then is our only resort, our emergency antidote to shoddy thinking and beliefs.
A frog in a well cannot discuss the ocean, because he is limited by the size of his well. A summer insect cannot discuss ice, because it knows only its own season. A narrow-minded scholar cannot discuss the Tao, because he is constrained by his teachings. Now you have come out of your banks and seen the Great Ocean. You now know your own inferiority… — Zhuangzi, The Way of Chaung Tzu
But the story teaches more than just humbleness. It also teaches compassion.
The well-frog does not know how big is the ocean because that poor fellow has never seen the outside world. There is no point berating the well frog for his ignorance. No point in cancelling the well frog. Because the well frog simply does not know any better, just like the prisoner of the cave whose ignorance is not his fault.
Tbh, this story further reminds me of my favourite little book, Flatland, written in 1884 by the English novelist and mathematician Edwin Abbot.
Flatland is a world where all inhabitants are two dimensional. There are squares, circles, triangles and other two dimensional figures. But one day, the Flatland is visited by a sphere from the three-dimensional world Spaceland. The flatlanders can only see the sphere as a circle. They are astonished to see the circle move and change size. The sphere tries to explain to flatlanders the concept of the third dimension, but the flatlanders don’t get it. No matter what, the flatlanders are unable to grasp the idea of a third dimension even after the sphere tries to make them understand the mathematics behind it.
The Flatland metaphor has been used to understand everything from the nature of physical reality, to the idea of religion, morality and meaning.
The Flatland metaphor is quite scary to imagine, even more scary than the frog example or the cave example. In the frog example, the frog could jump out of the well and see the ocean, in the cave example, the prisoner could escape from the cave and see the outside world, but in Flatland example, no matter what, there is no way, absolutely no way that the flatlander is going to see or understand the third dimension.
It’s not that the flatlander does not know any better, it’s that they cannot ever possibly know better.
That is scary, is not it?
Story 2) The Emperor’s Clothes
This is a short story written by a Danish author Hans Christian Andersen in 1800s which has now become a popular idiom and it goes something like this:
One day, a vain emperor who loved beautiful and expensive clothes hired two cloth weavers to make him the best suit in the entire world.
The cloth weavers promised that the clothes they make will be very special. So special in fact that only the most enlightened ones would be able to see them.
They come and present their special clothes to the emperor which they claim are invisible, and the emperor out of fear of not being called unenlightened pretends to see the clothes and happily adorn them.
He then roams around his kingdom practically naked, and everyone compliments the emperor and his clothes because no one wants to be called unenlightened.
Then a small kid who has no idea what’s going on points at the emperor and shouts, ‘The emperor is not wearing any clothes.’
That was the whole story in a nutshell.
A short note here: I first heard this story from my father as a kid. And tbh, the iteration I heard was very different from the Danish story.
In that localized version, a holy man with a donkey comes to an emperor and tells him that if he stood on his donkey, he would be able to see the view of Mecca. ‘Only true believers’ says the holy man could see that holy view. Curious, the emperor stands on the donkey, and since he does not want to be labelled as a disbeliever, he jumps happily thanking God that he could see Mecca even though he could not.
This story is a demonstration of an important concept in social psychology known as pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a social bias in which majority of group members privately reject a belief or a norm, but go along with it because they assume, incorrectly, that others in the group accept it. It’s also described as “no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.”
In the above story, the emperor does not believe that there any clothes, but because of the fear of being called stupid, he pretends to see the clothes. And once the emperor has seen the clothes, other people soon line up because who can go against the emperor.
What fascinates me about this story is that for instance in the local version that my father narrated it just took one person, literally just one person to convince the entire people of a certain belief or thing. This makes me think of Jim Jones, the cult leader of People’s Town who convinced more than 900 people to drink cyanide-laced juice and take their own lives for the sake of utopia he promised them. In fact, everything from one-man religions, to Multi-Level Marketing to cults, fads, fashion trends, can be thought of in the light of the Emperor’s phenomenon.
BTW on a side note, it’s very important to note that the holy man or the two cloth weavers in the stories above could perhaps be lying or fooling the entire population on purpose. But what we often don’t consider is that these people might themselves be genuinely and truthfully convinced or naively deluded about their claims.
The Emperor’s story is not just a story, but it is also now a problem in game theory known as The Emperor’s Dilemma. In the problem, there are two categories of agents, true believers and false believers. True believers are those who genuinely believe a certain idea or thing. False believers are those that don’t really believe, but because they think everyone believes, or because of the fear of being outcasted, they go along with it.
True believers are more common than we like to think. In fact, most leaders of closely-knit religious or spiritual groups are true believers in the sense that they are genuinely and utterly convinced of the claims and beliefs they espouse. In other words, they are not shams, as most sceptics think, quite the opposite in fact. They usually have good almost perfect self-justifications for their claims, beliefs, theories, and prophecies. Which is even more dangerous than simply lying if you think about it.
In the book, Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me, the psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson illustrate this point beautifully that lying or outright fooling is a lesser evil because at least the person knows in their heart that what they are espousing is bullshit, the real interesting and dangerous thing is when the person in both their heart and mind is unshakably convinced of the things they espouse without ever knowing in their deepest of conscience that what they are espousing is bullshit.
In the game of Emperor’s Dilemma, you need a very small number of true believers usually around 10% to convince the entire population of a certain idea or thing.
There is a name for this phenomenon. It’s called, “the tyranny of the minority.”
It can be described as “only a few people truly believe, but everyone thinks that everyone truly believes.”
In social psychology, the tyranny of minority has been blamed for large majorities of the public remaining silent on climate change. The gun problem in the U.S, for instance, has been defined in terms of a small loud minority overpowering the concerns of the majority.
It is thought to play a role in the rise of Soviet regime, as it’s known that many people opposed the regime but assumed that others were supporters of it since a few prominent people in power seemed utterly convinced of the dream of a communist utopia. The tyranny of minority can also be used to explain the spread of fascism, Islamism, and extremism where a small, loud and often violent minority come to dominate the discourse of an entire society.
It is also thought to be involved in gender roles and norms. For example, men’s conception of how other men are supposed to behave shapes the persistent ideas of masculinity in society. Research shows that most men are uncomfortable with other men ‘bragging about sexual acts and giving details’ but most men believe that all other men like to partake in such displays. In a similar way, men tend to underestimate other men’s desire to want proper consent during sex. This often feeds into toxic expectations and stereotypes of masculinity in society.
The Emperor’s phenomenon is everywhere around us.
Story 3: The Lost Key and the Lamp Post
This is not a story, but more of an allegory which I heard in an academic setting and it goes something like this:
A police officer sees a drunken man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and asks him the goal of his quest. The drunken man replies that he is looking for his car keys. The officer then helps the man for a few minutes without success then he asks whether the man is certain that he dropped the keys near the lamp post. “No,” is the reply, “I lost the keys somewhere across the street.” “Why look here?” asks the surprised and irritated officer. “The light is much better here,” says the intoxicated man with aplomb.
That was the whole story in a nutshell.
This fable is thought to have first appeared featuring Seljuk Sufi mystic Nasrudin Hodja.
Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground. ‘What did you lose, Mulla?’ he asked. ‘My key’, Nasrudin replied. So they both went down and looked for it. After a while, the other man asked, ‘Where exactly did you drop it?’ ‘In my own house.’ ‘Then why are you looking here?’ ‘There is more light here than inside my own house.’
This fable was quoted in the book The Hindus: An Alternative History by Indian historian Wendy Doniger who used it as an example of how the ‘light’ on history — its social, cultural, political and artistic aspects have always illuminated the perspectives of dominant groups, and pushed into shadows the viewpoints of women, lower castes and other marginalized groups.
In the West, when writers and poets in the 1800s begun asking the question, “where are all the women writers and poets?” they were basically ‘searching where the light is.’ It was Virginia Woolf perhaps who answered this question in her timeless essay, A Room of One’s Own where she talked about unnoticed Shakespeare’s sisters of history noting that a woman with writing and artistic abilities couldn’t possibly develop it into a legacy because of the constraints of family, finances and femininity.
I think this is one of the apt examples of confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence. It’s another way to describe ‘searching where the light is’ phenomenon. Remember I said that I heard the story in an academic setting, well to be precise, I heard the story in a data science class. And the point was just because you don’t have data points on something does not necessarily mean that the ‘something’ does not exist. Or to put in another way, just because there is missing data about something does not mean that the ‘something’ is missing. For instance, just because there is no record of homosexuals living in Saudi Arabia does not mean that homosexuals do not exist in Saudi Arabia.
While all of this is fine and dandy, the ‘searching where the light is’ metaphor has other meanings as well. It also means that everyone, each one of us, have our own unique lamp posts under which we like to look at the world. We have our own ‘light’ through which we view all the things in the world.
A pessimist among us will always find pessimism in everything he or she looks at. An optimist optimism. A depressed person will always find a way to sabotage his or her happiness because the ‘light’ under which they view the world rests on the assumption that they don’t deserve happiness.
It’s not just our personal light.
A Marxist will always look at everything in terms of class relations. A feminist in terms of gender relations. An economist will only view the world in terms of wealth and utility.
In fact, there is a private joke in academia that if you asked the question, ‘why did the chicken cross the road?’ the different experts would give the following answers. If you asked an evolutionary biologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because they saw a potential mate on the other side. If you asked a kinesiologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the muscles in the leg contracted and pulled the leg bone forward during each step.” If you asked a neuroscientist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the neurons in the chicken’s brain fired and triggered the movement.”
It’s amazing how everyone views the world under their preferred lamp posts. Sometimes though it’s nice to hop from one lamp post to another. That is part of knowledge.
Speaking of knowledge, the lamp post analogy is actually a primary example of the limitations of human knowledge.
Consider this. There are things we know, Then there are things we don’t know. Then there are things we know that we don’t know. And then there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know. It is the ‘things that we don’t know that we don’t know’ that is the scariest of all.
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” — Daniel Kahneman
Most forms of knowledge which includes scientific knowledge — not just about the physical world, but about our psychological and social worlds can go as far as the light of lamp post goes. Outside that, it cannot really know anything. Noam Chomsky put it precisely when he said that, “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”
This seems a little dreadful. Is not it? I mean if that is true, then what’s the point of gaining knowledge when we are never going to know some things anyway? When there will always be things that out of our knowable universe?
No one knew the answer better than T.H. Huxley who said:
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. — T. H. Huxley, 1887
