Human mind a Procrustean Bed?

It was long time ago, time when I was in middle school. My class teacher narrated a scary story from Greek Mythology - 'The story of Proscrustes'. It is the story of an evil guy named Procrustes, son of Poseidon, who had a iron bed. He would invite innocent bypassers to spend the night in his den, provide them good dinner and have them sleep on his iron bed. He was somehow obsessed with fitting his guests to his bed. If his guest was longer then the bed, he would chop of the excess portion of the guest's legs. If the guest was shorter then then bed, he would stretch them. His original name was Damastes but was nicknamed Proscrustes which means ' the stretcher'. I had forgotten this story until it was brought back to mainstream discussion by Author/Economist Nassim Taleb, of the Black Swan fame,  whose new book is titled 'The Bed of Procrustes'.

In the early part of 2000's I received a email forward from a friend. It detailed that the right age difference for a married couple was three years. It had the reasons explained which I do not want to detail as they are very silly. Not surprisingly the age difference between this guy and his wife was, you guessed it, three. A few years later, I received a similar email with a forwarded message from another friend belonging to a different group. The email content was exactly the same with a single minor difference. The ideal age difference between a married man and woman was five in this email. No prizes for guessing how young this guys wife was - five years. Everything else remained the same in the two emails, word to word, alphabet to alphabet excepting the age difference. Procrustes was streching or cutting his guests to fit his bed. My friends were shortening or lengthening the age difference in the emails to fit their personal experiences. This stretching, shortening of facts to suit our beliefs is a common theme among us humans. The above email anecdote has no negative consequences other than light banter, but this nature of humans might have serious implications.

It was the year 2008 and the economy was in shambles. The financial markets were in turmoil and highly volatile. I was just entering the stock market. As is normal of amateur stock market traders/investors, I was confident that I could beat the market gurus out there. I decided to go short on the market especially the oil. It turned out to be a huge mistake. For a while I was making money, a lot of it. But the first rule is you don't make any money unless you realize the gains in your positions. That was a hard and expensive lesson. Greed and confirmation bias kept me piling on more money on the short side and then something happened. The market turned around and I did not close my shorts. Instead I added more to my shorts believing in my hypothesis - that the economy was in shambles and that oil was headed much much lower. A few months were gone along with a few thousands and I came to my senses. I covered my shorts after having almost lost my clothes. I haven't recovered from that whipsaw and am continue to shy away from the stock markets.

I have noticed this penchant for stretching facts to confirm of belief and decisions, instead of the other way round - Our beliefs should be stretched or shortened based on the facts. There is more to the story of Procrustes. For every villian there has to be a hero, atleast in mythologies. So the hero in this story is Theseus, who visits Procrustes and convinces him to lie on his own bed. Procrustes is longer than the bed and Theseus decapitates him. Thus, keeping intact the tradition of fitting humans to the bed of Procrustes. This story feels flawed now, but it resonates well the theme of how our mind works. I almost lost the savings  in my budding retirement account due to my bias. In this age of information, our search for confirmation is a just a click away. We can get confirmation to our beliefs for any sort of weird thing that one can imagine. You can also find staunch supporters too of your belief and all of this is just a click away. Some of these may be less harmful, but there will be occassions when the repurcussions are more than benign.

I conclude by quoting Nassim Taleb from his new book 'The bed of Procrustes' - we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.