weirdness factor

I was at home studying with friends the day after watching 2046, walking around in our lounge room, when something caught my eye. Backtracking, and bewildered at what I thought I saw, my gaze eventually rested on what had alerted me. Sitting there, on the shelf, was 2046. My parents must have somehow gotten a copy overseas, but I had never noticed until then. What a waste of money, was my first thought, as the previous day a whole bunch of us had paid $10 each to see the movie. The excuses and ways I tried to soothe myself were that it was a great movie cinematographically, and well worth watching at the cinema. Also, now this would mean I could watch it again and perhaps make more light of the movie and its plot.

Thinking from my previous post (pellagra), I feel I need to elaboate on the idea of the coincidentality. Summarising from what Chi has mentioned, the factors that are important are: rarity, awareness, and degree of control. Perhaps there are more too - this will require more thought.

Rarity is the chance that each event will happen, or even that both will happen within a certain time frame of each other. The rarer the occurrences, the more weird the coincidence will be.

Awareness I think is the presence of a certain idea in your mind, and/or being on the lookout for more of the similar experience once you see the first one. I think one of the arguments I was trying to give in my earlier post was that most of the time things may occur, with equal rarity, but we may see a similarity in one situation but not another - and this is because we are looking for something. Using Chi's example, I'm supposing that there would be a difference in response if you saw a black cat and the stock market crashed, versus you seeing a black cat and the stock market having a boom (and assuming this holds equal chance of occurrence - rarity). In one, people may say that there was more than a coincidence in the first, whilst (even though the chance of occurrence was just as rare) in the second, this connection would go unnoticed. This is essentially because we are looking for something in one, but not the other - awareness.

The third is the amount of control we have over both events. The less in control of the events (or the less we seem in control) the more spooky it is as the outcome wasn't 'artificially' generated by you. Once again, Chi's other example is useful in that Vesna having milk for breakfast is out of your control, whilst you having milk is totally in your control. The less in control, the freakier the coincidence.

Well, with all this in mind, I have come to a plan of categorising any future situations in terms of these 3 factors, perhaps on a scale of 1-10 in each. 10 would be for the most rare, the least aware, and the least in control, in each of the scales respectively. From these, perhaps after addition or multiplication we should be able to come to a 'weirdness' rating for the situation. What application this has, I don't know. But at least we might be able to compare situations and see what really goes on in the world.

Lately, I've noticed what has started to become an annoying behaviour on my part. In the past, this action was always performed automatically and never given any thought, but now I've started to wonder about it. When someone asks me a question, my immediate response is to answer directly and straight away, more so if I'm put under a pressured situation. After reflection on my responses, I find that sometimes being direct is not the best option, nor perhaps even giving an answer. Using questions to the extent to demonstrate you've understood, or perhaps even talking about the issue without actually addressing the specifics of the question are other options amongst many more. As serious as this topic sounds, I'm not intentionally applying it to exam situations and the like - it holds true for social interactions for me. So why after all this time, do I still carrying on the way I do? I think all I need is some more awareness, and practice, and perhaps things will start changing.