This is how the world works: you want to save trouble, you want to be simple, and you can do it. However, one day, you have to pay it back.

Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Idea ’s Ideal” (ID: xiaoyaolsh) , author : Effie’s ideal.

In real life, many people think about problems like this:

“The new foreign pneumonia will be as violent as possible, and hit them hard, so that our economy can not go up?”

Or something like this:

“My income is 300,000 this year, an increase of 10% compared to last year, so next year it will be 330,000, and the next year will be 363,000. The average house price here is 40,000 yuan / square meter. Can I buy a house and marry my wife? “

In fact, what is hidden behind these two sentences is the “linear thinking” that many people are accustomed to but do not know.

Decades of cognitive psychology research shows that it is difficult for the human brain to understand nonlinear relationships. Our brains tend to be simple straight lines, that is, linear relationships.

And this “linear thinking” based on linear relationships is what most of us are best at, because it is the simplest and most instinctive.

However, if you look closely, you will find that the extreme anxiety, confusion, and blind optimism that we often fall into are all inextricably linked to this way of thinking. And their ultimate point is often the dilemma of life.

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Harmful linear thinking

In 1962, three psychiatrists proposed the use of elephants for the study of LSD, that is, psychedelics.

The reason for choosing elephants is that elephants, especially Asian elephants, regularly experience an unpredictable transition from normal calm obedience to a highly aggressive, even dangerous, state of up to two weeks.

The three psychiatrists agreed that this violent, strange, and usually destructive behavior was triggered by LSD that was automatically generated in the elephant ’s brain.

Therefore, they want to observe whether LSD can really trigger this strange state. If this is the case, you can get information on the efficacy of LSD in humans by studying elephants.

If you want to do this research, the first thing you need to determine is: How much LSD should be injected into the elephant?

At that time, no one knew the safe dose of LSD, but people knew that even a dose of less than 0.25 mg of LSD would make people hallucinate. And for catsThe safe dose of LSD is 0.1 mg per kg of body weight.

Therefore, these researchers used these figures to estimate how much LSD should be injected into the elephant.

This elephant weighs about 3000 kilograms, so they expect that, based on the known safe dose of cats, the safe and appropriate dose for this elephant should be 0.1 milligrams per kilogram times 3000 Kilograms, that is 300 mg of LSD.

Who knows, just less than 5 minutes after the injection, the elephant yelled, then fell down suddenly and entered a persistent state of epilepsy. In this way, the poor elephant died after 1 hour and 40 minutes.

The researchers concluded that elephants are quite sensitive to LSD.

In fact, this is not the real reason at all. The real reason is that they are accustomed to linear thinking: the safe dose of cats is 0.1 mg per kilogram, so, in a linear way of thinking, you can multiply 0.1 by 3000 (because the elephant ’s It weighs 3,000 times the weight of a cat), so the elephant was injected with 300 mg of LSD.

But in fact, how the drug dosage should be scaled from one animal to another is still an open question with no final conclusion.

There are many factors involved in the process of drugs being transported to specific organs and tissues and absorbed. Like metabolites and oxygen, drugs are usually transported across cell membranes, sometimes by diffusion, and sometimes by network systems. As a result, the factors that determine the dose are largely limited by the surface area of ​​an organism, not its volume or weight, and these factors will vary nonlinearly with body weight.

For elephants, the appropriate dose should be close to a few milligrams, rather than the hundreds of milligrams actually implemented.

It can be seen that the scaled change of the drug dose does not change linearly with the weight change of the drug user. On the contrary, its changes are complicated.

So, it was nothing else that killed the elephant, it was the linear thinking of the three researchers.

Similarly, for many people, what makes them troubled time and time again may not be anything else, but linear thinking that has long been accustomed to.

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So, what is linear thinking?

Linear thinking is a linear, uniform, invariant, single, single-dimensional way of thinking, everything is given with the initial conditions.

The concept of linear relationship originally came from mathematics. If there is a linear function relationship between two variables, it is a linear relationship, and its performance is a straight line, as shown in the following figure.

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Four linear thinking Life dilemma brought

In our daily life and work, linear thinking is everywhere, and many of our life dilemmas are inseparable from it.

Linear Thinking 1. Predict the future by simply copying past experience

Everyone wants to have the ability to predict the future, but they do n’t know how to predict it, so “simply copying past experience to infer the future” becomes the simplest method.

And it is one of the most common manifestations of linear thinking.

· In the past, I was a top student and a class committee, so after entering the workplace, I would definitely become an excellent employee and get a quick promotion.

· In the past, my academic performance was not good, so after entering the workplace, I will definitely be very ordinary and unknown.

· In the past, this stock rebounded as soon as it fell to 20 yuan, so I would buy again when it fell to 20 yuan next time.

· In the past, I bought stocks several times and made money every time, so according to my method, I will definitely make money all the time.

· In the past, I have failed twice in starting a business, so this time I will certainly not succeed, I should go back to work.

These are all ways of thinking by simply copying past experience to predict the future, and this way of thinking will put us in a dilemma of action.

Here, I share a real case with you.

Meisheng Group, a famous American investment institution, once had a very famous fund manager named Bill Miller. The funds managed by him have beat the S & P 500 Index for 15 consecutive years since 1991. This is a very impressive investment performance.

In 2007, the subprime mortgage crisis broke out, and a large number of banks and financial institutions suffered heavy losses, and within a short period of time they fell by 50% of the stock price.

Bill Miller believes that this is the best time to buy, because from his past experience, these stocks have never fallen so low, and if they fall so low, it is definitely from past experience. It is an extremely suitable buying opportunity that is not encountered in a hundred years.

So, when these stocks fell to 50%, he bought a lot, because based on past experience, he thought that the 50% decline must be in the end, before