You see a list of emojis, one by one. You are told there are two categories of emojis, but NOT what the categories are.
You realize it’s impossible to figure out what the category is from just looking at 1, or 2. You have some guess when you see 3-5. Maybe you start to get real confident when you get to 10, 20, 50.
Then you get a real curveball, doesn’t fit into either. You think real hard, you realize your categories were wrong! two new categories fit much better!!! You re-organize everything.
The real punchline is, maybe there are actually THREE CATEGORIES. So no two categories will ever fit.
(the real, real punchline is there are no categories. There are just emojis. You can categorize them in lots of ways. The categories are helpful but they are not “real”. ALL of life is like this. See Ken Wilber, “No Boundary”.)
“no boundary” doesn’t mean nothing is different. It means there’s lots of complexity and patterns in reality, and no sharp edges. Everything is far more connected and related than we currently assume.
Why this is mindblowing
I think this has big ramifications if you really internalize it. I think games are a great way to internalize ideas.
For example, an experiment like this is my attempt to get people to wrench the categories/preconcieved notions they use to filter the world through:
twitter experiment: scroll your feed with authorship hidden, all posts are anonymous
I predict that I would find something I like by someone who’s views I hate and would never normally admit I like their post
https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1805236533361840548
On a similar note: Imagine a shopping complex having garments from various brands ranging from LV to your local mall brand - but - with no tags or branding.
See Nuance is easy.