What if Kurt Vonnegut Had Done “Shapes of Thinking” Instead
Plus, what's a halfalogue?
Issue No. 46
Many years ago, I was on a call with an acquisitions editor when she brought up Kurt Vonnegut and said the proposal we were discussing reminded her of him. I’d never heard of Vonnegut before. I looked him up and one of the things that popped up was a talk he once gave on what he called the shapes of stories.
He’d draw two axes on a blackboard. The bottom one would be a timeline and the left one would be some dimension like, say, good fortune. Then he’d plot a line.
The person’s good fortune starts out somewhere above the middle, he’d say, because “why care about a depressing person?” It plummets as the story goes on and then goes back up to higher than it was by the end.
He called the shape Man in Hole, emphasizing that it needn’t be about a man or about a hole. And so on for other shapes of lines.
It got me wondering: what if we had a similar catalog of shapes, but for thinking. Shapes of thinking. Here’s how I’d imagine some cognitive biases looking. Try showing them to someone and seeing if they can guess which is which.
With confirmation bias, we start with some conviction and end at that same conviction no matter what the journey in between looks like. The journey never has us ending at some other conviction because we’ve happened to stumble across some disconfirming evidence that we deem compelling.
(Best paired with Don’t Stop Believin’ 🎶)
With the sunk cost fallacy, we’re torn between staying the course and leaving, even when the evidence shows us that the opportunity cost of not leaving is higher than what we get from staying. The longer we’ve been at something, the harder it becomes to escape it. It could be an investment, a relationship, or a career even.
(Best paired with Should I Stay or Should I Go? 🎶)
With the self-fulfilling fallacy, we feed our imaginary expectations until, by and by, they turn into real expectations.
(Best paired with Bad Moon Rising 🎶)
With Dunning-Kruger effect, we have this idea of someone with low capability perceiving themselves as being highly capable, and so they exude overconfidence. And then the corollary to that is someone with high capability who underestimates their relative standing because they assume others find things as easy as they do.
(Best paired with any clip of Michael Scott from The Office.)
And with the endowment effect, our perception of how valuable something is depends on whether we own that thing or whether someone else owns it.
(Best paired with Everything I Own 🎶)
There are undoubtedly other ways of visualizing these concepts. Feel free to riff on these sketches or make new ones. Send your work my way. It would be fun to start a collection. (I’ll share these on Instagram later this week with music.)
Halfalogues
Ever wonder why it’s so hard to sometimes tune someone out on a train or a bus when you’re within earshot of them talking on the phone? It turns out, the experience has a name: halfalogues. And someone did a study to see if they compromise our cognitive abilities.
Hearing half a conversation is distracting because we are unable to predict the succession of speech. It requires more attention … The experiments the researchers conducted showed that people overhearing cell phone conversations did more poorly on cognitive tasks that demanded the kinds of attention we use to tend to daily activities, than when overhearing both sides of a cell phone conversation or a dialogue, which resulted in no decreased performance.
Habits
She pours boiling water from a kettle onto a nest of tea leaves, shaking them out of their slumber. Aided by the kitchen wall, she carries her mug between thumb and forefinger to the table and sits facing a window overlooking the backyard. Many things have changed in six decades of married life, but not this ritual.
In the other room, he’s on his computer. To one side, an office shredder brimming with strips of paper marked in red. He clicks on the file called morning routine, hits print, and waits as ten problem sets emerge, each answered in a different handwriting.
He carries the stack of papers to the kitchen and places it on the table. From under a well-worn cardigan, he pulls out a red pen and rests it on top of the pile. Though her teaching days are behind her, she’ll mark those ten assignments, like she does every morning, and then check on the plants in the garden, like she does every morning.
To be great, be whole; exclude
Nothing, exaggerate nothing that is you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
The whole moon gleams in every pool,
It rides so high.
—Fernando Pessoa (Poems of Fernando Pessoa)
Until next time.
Be well,
Ali
P.S. Some past issues to read through in case you missed them.
