Twins in yellow Fiat Pandas

Years ago when my wife was pregnant with our twins, I saw twins everywhere. I was practically bombarded with them. And I thought it was something special. Well, no. I saw them everywhere. Cars with twins, identical twins, twin twins. Every day I saw some.

Until they were born and I didn't see them.

Yesterday I was talking to an entrepreneur about this and he told me that they had a gimmick on vacation in Italy that they were being chased by yellow Fiat Pandas

'And guess what Ed? We saw them everywhere. But even in the Netherlands I saw them for a while. Yellow Fiat Pandas everywhere. But now? I never see them anymore...'

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Do you know it? Named after the terrorist action group from Germany in the 1980s. There was a discussion about this phenomenon on an online forum in 1994, and then someone mentioned that name and that he suddenly came across it everywhere.

Arnold Zwicky renamed this the frequency illusion in 2006. You know the drill. You want to buy new shoes and suddenly you see exactly those new shoes everywhere. Or with cars, or with whatever.

We talked about that in combination with Facebook's algorithm. That you only see what you want to see. That you are only pursued by ads you "want" to see or have shown interest in.

The entrepreneur I spoke with said, "Your life gets so constrained don't you think? You don't see what's outside that algorithm'

I say 'It's like life isn't it? You see a completely different reality than I do. What I care about and believe I see. Like I saw twins everywhere and you saw yellow Fiat Pandas'

So if you want to see what's out there then you need to shift your focus what you care about and start believing something else. Then you will naturally start to see something different in this algorithmic reality.

See first then believe? No, believe first then see. After all, you do now 😉