When our hunter-gatherer ancestors heard a rustling in the jungle, they instinctively interpreted it as a potential tiger. Most of the time, it was just the wind sweeping through the leaves. When they were wrong, they lost nothing. But, when they were right, they lived another day.
They relied on binary thinking — threat or non-threat, good or bad — for survival. They didn’t have the luxury to say, “10% chance of tiger and 90% leaves” (which was often the case, by the way). Survival demanded quick, decisive judgment.
Today, we live in a far safer and more stable world, where such binary thinking often does more harm than good. It blinds us to nuance and leads to missed opportunities. What we need now is probabilistic thinking — thinking in percentages, not absolutes.
For instance, instead of labeling someone as “bad,” we might evaluate them as being 75% good and 25% bad, additionally realizing that bad part might be shaped by recent experiences, not his entire personality. Can I trust him now? Maybe yes.
Life is rarely black and white — it’s a spectrum of grays.
And learning to live in that gray is where growth happens.
Parth Choudhury 