My dear one always complained that I am not so fond of surprises. Deep inside, I do appreciate an element of surprise in my life. But sometimes life brings along difficult surprises to you, and they are so surprising that you start doubting the law of gravity. Anyway, $#i+ happens! But one needs to learn to deal with such hostile situations in life. This talk is not authoritative enough due to the uniqueness of each situation, but discusses the human nature that decides how we deal with them.

Like most artificial intelligence engines do, the human mind also runs on a learning model. This model is prepared and maintained by the brain by storing information about situations in the past along with environmental factors around them,  the decisions taken then, and the outcome of the situation. And it is this model that the mind tries to exploit when dealing with new situations. Don’t we always try to relate to the past? We somehow try to force-fit the current situation to something in the past and then apply the known outcome to the situation. But this model needs to be used with caution. Worse enough, we also involve statistics based on other people’s experience of similar situations and impose it on ours. The urban dictionary calls it ‘superstistics’, the use of prior evidence of one event to predict the outcome of another unrelated event – from the words superstitious and statistics. Continue reading Dealing with surprises! →