On Numerology, Astrology and Search Noise
In my last tea hosting, one of the guests was a numerologist - she believes and consults on life according to numerical patterns. This, together with astrology, tarot readings and such, claim to bring meaning and suggestions in a mystic way. In this I do not believe.
I do believe, however, that such methods could be beneficial, because they introduce noise to decisions and thought processes. I’ll explain:
Several years ago I stumbled upon a search engine with an interesting premise - it takes your search string, adds a random word to it and sends the amended search string to Google. This means that, for the same original search, you could get different results. By looking for “courses in my area”, and getting search results for “courses in my area chocolate” (“chocolate” being a random word added to the search), I’ll get a bias to chocolatier courses, which I might not have gotten by just googling the original phrase.
Numerology, astrology and other mystical and spiritual methods introduce such noise to our thought processes by having a special glossary as a lens. If you have a life question (e.g. “what should be my next line of work?”), and a numerologist finds in your map numbers that represents creativity, this introduces the “creativity” lens to look through when searching for that line of work. It gives ground to ideas for creative professions that might not have been thought of otherwise, and it gives them more weight, changing the decision’s bias.
I think that there are many other simpler ways to generate the same noise - maybe even getting random words from a dictionary or a random wikipedia article. These, I believe, have the exact same mystical value as the more mystical methods (none), and they introduce noise. Maybe a small dictionary of specific, relevant words would work better.
I don’t think that introducing search noise is always a good idea - I won’t take, for example, serious medical decisions like that. But for many subjects, this could be a tool to make you take a decision when you’re stuck, or find a new idea when you don’t have any good ones.
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