U. A hero is someone who is. Admired or idealized for their courage or. Outstanding achievements or noble deeds. Something like this. But there's a distinction between the way society portrays heroes. And it comes down to what I. Consider the two core types of hero. In society, a hero is either presented as an extraordinary individual in ordinary circumstances. Or an ordinary individual in extraordinary circumstances. For example, we often see this distinction.
Play out in television series and movies, right? The main character either has an eccentric personality doing regular things. So this might be a lawyer, a doctor. Or a hacker who is extra quirky. Or intelligence, extra quirky or intelligent, living in a familiar world. Or someone average going up against an incredible situation. So it might be a school kid, a teacher, a quote unquote nobody who ends up changing the world, right? In both cases, the individual is admired or idealized.
But they represent inverse relationships between individual and environment. Now, technically, we have four possibilities here. When we combine the idea of an individual with their environment. There's the ordinary person in an ordinary environment, an extraordinary person in an extraordinary environment. And then the ones I'm talking about the ordinary person in an extraordinary environment. And an extraordinary individual in an ordinary environment.
So there's four ways to make those combinations. But I would argue that only the. Extraordinary individual in the ordinary environment. Or the ordinary individual in the extraordinary environment. Is the combination we tend to see between the way the hero is portrayed and the environment that they're in. And I think that's just because if you have an ordinary person in an ordinary environment, that's kind of boring. That's literally just like having a camera on someone doing everyday life.
Nobody really would be inspired by that. Or wants to see that. And then similarly, the extraordinary hero in the extraordinary environment. Although you do see that sometimes it doesn't provide enough contrast for that to be particularly interesting. Right. So in this episode, I'm focusing on the way that I think we typically tend to see the way heroes are portrayed. And those are two possibilities. One is the extraordinary individual in an ordinary environment.
Or the ordinary person in the extraordinary environment. So I think there's a problem with the extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. When it comes to choosing a hero. When it comes to thinking about someone that you might want to be inspired by, and more importantly, beyond inspiration, somebody you would want to learn something from. Right?
I mean, I think that's really the purpose of having what you might call a hero is somebody to not just kind of admire or be inspired by, but to kind of look upon what they're doing in life and say, maybe I should do things in a similar fashion to actually learn something, a principle. A strategy, whatever it is. So are you going to look at.
Someone who's an ordinary person in an extraordinary environment or the inverse kind of an extraordinary person, just kind of living in an ordinary environment? Well, I think there's a problem with. Choosing a hero who is an extraordinary person in an ordinary circumstance or environment. So let's pick apart why I think. This is, let's say, the extra quirky or intelligent hero. That's going to be someone who many people want to identify with, maybe, right? It might be how they wish to be viewed.
But in reality, none of us have such exaggerated personalities. I mean, the problem with portraying extraordinary. People in ordinary circumstances is, I would. Argue, nobody can really relate to them. So imagine a socially awkward individual on. A sitcom who doesn't understand sarcasm, but they end up being portrayed as extremely intelligent. So this would be like an EO hero, right? An extraordinary individual in an ordinary environment.
Now, some people might view this awkward hero as someone they wish to be like, while wanting to look nerdy might sound od. Consider that society associates socially awkward behavior with higher intelligence. And so people might choose to quote unquote, relate to this hero because despite their social ineptitude, the hero possesses some quality they themselves wish to be known for.
Or imagine a television doctor portrayed as a brilliant diagnostician, another eo hero, an extraordinary individual, but in kind of everyday circumstances. But imagine that he also has a caustic and overbearing personality. So maybe he ignores ethical standards and often applies unconventional and morally ambiguous methods. His lack of empathy and disregard for authority kind of leads him to being manipulative and deceiving.
But despite his blatant and exaggerated downsides, many people will still admire him because they believe his poor behavior is actually a social cue for a trait they wish to be known for. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying real people can't be socially awkward or have toxic personalities, but they are never at the level portrayed in television and movies. Right. This kind of raises the question, though. Why would anyone bother relating to someone with obvious downsides?
And I already kind of hinted at this. It's because the hero's exaggerated behavior, whether that's socially awkward, obnoxious or even absent minded or something, it sends a strong signal to others that they are a certain type of person. So even if you are genuinely smart or strong or determined, how would anyone know unless there is a signal that says as much without you spending the time to demonstrate such qualities? Rather than putting in the legwork, to genuinely be astute.
It just seems easier to kind of be known for smartness just by virtue of your od personality, right? Extraordinary heroes don't always get portrayed with downsides either. I mean, a superhero with amazing physical strength might inspire some, but again, it's far beyond any physical power we would possess ourselves. And it's not all fiction. Both historical and living legends are the subject of admiration. But history does not speak of inventors or leaders as regular people, right?
Rather as geniuses and people who have accomplished extraordinary things. Even today's top ceos or Hollywood celebrities are viewed or sold in the same kind of fashion, right? So in all these cases, the heroes are portrayed not as normal people, but as extraordinary individuals operating in environments we are familiar with. Now, I'm not a psychologist, so my theory on people's motives isn't the point.
The real point is people will find ways to admire or idealize individuals who, in reality, they cannot relate to. I think that's a problem. And now there's an evolutionary argument for why this might be. I mean, humans use signals to assess people in situations without having to know all the details, right? That's why they would do that. But the reality is we cannot relate to extraordinary people because they aren't real.
On the fictional side, the reason is either obvious, we don't have superhuman strength, we cannot fly, or, based on some projected insecurity, like I've been saying, people wanting to be seen as extra unique or smart, whatever. And on the real people side, the exaggerated personalities and stories we hear about inventors, scientists, actors, ceos, I would say that's a little more than survivorship bias, right? We concentrate on the people who became well known and overlook those who did not.
If we looked at those who did not become well known, we would realize that famous people are quite ordinary. After all. As I like to say, winners and losers have the same stories, not in their details, but in their capacity to control the outcome. We cannot relate to extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances because they don't exist. Nobody acts like that, and nobody has all the ideas or determination to go it alone.
The EO hero, the extraordinary individual in the ordinary circumstance that we see so much is both highly ubiquitous and wholly unrelatable. So what I'm going to argue in this episode is that I get why people choose heroes. It makes sense to be inspired. You want to look at what's possible. And again, just to recap, there's kind of two versions of this that I think we tend to see. Either see the extraordinary person kind of in that ordinary environment.
So maybe it's the extraordinarily nerdy or intelligent or altruistic or whatever it is. And then he's going about a world that we recognize, and we kind of see this overbearing personality shine through, or it's the other one where you have this ordinary person, but they're in extraordinary circumstances, and they rise to the challenge. I argue in this episode that heroes should be ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. So why is that? Let's get back into these combinations.
So you have an ordinary person that would be someone like you and me. Okay. Ordinary circumstances are situations that we would face every day. Extraordinary people would be those portrayed as having exaggerated skills or intelligence, and extraordinary circumstances would be the rare situations or events that deviate significantly from our usual experience. Not that they don't happen, but they would just be extreme. Right.
I'd argue that only ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances represent the best kind of hero because they sit in the most realistic and informative quadrant. Meaning if we take those four combinations of ordinary, ordinary, extraordinary. Ordinary, ordinary, extraordinary, and extraordinary, extraordinary. Right. Those four possible combinations, the ordinary, extraordinary, if you think about it as quadrants, ends up being the most revealing, the most important.
For reasons I'll get into throughout this episode, not only can we relate to ordinary people, we can also relate to extraordinary circumstances, actually, because since although they are rare, they do happen. Right. There are natural disasters, political unrest, market crashes, pandemics, layoffs, illness, the ending of a long term relationship, that kind of thing.
Heroes should be ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances because they represent people who have traits we ourselves might possess. And those traits are tested in the best way possible under extreme circumstances. This kind of gets into what ends up being most informative. And as I'll kind of argue throughout this episode, it's got to be that specific combination.
I think you got to have the ordinary person you can relate to because it's traits you can take on, but you got to have the extraordinary circumstances so that there's this nice contrast. That kind of battle tests those recognizable traits in the best way possible. Let's compare Superman to Batman. Some of you might have your favorites, but Superman obviously has superhuman strength. He can fly as fast as a speeding bullet, has x ray vision, all this kind of stuff.
And he uses these powers to save people from natural disasters, rescue people from accidents, deliver victims from burning buildings, prevent suicides, and either even, apparently, perform emergency surgery. In one example, extreme situations, but ones that are recognizable. And Batman takes quite a different approach. Batman uses gadgets, relies on detective skills, martial arts, strategic planning.
So both Superman and Batman are doing some of these kind of, let's say, in this example, extraordinary but familiar circumstances. But only Batman is someone we can reasonably relate to. Right. The other quadrants, as I call them, as other combinations of individual and environment, they don't really measure up. I mean, the ordinary person in an ordinary environment and the extraordinary person in the extraordinary environment are not being tested rigorously enough for it to be interesting.
Right? There's no contrast there. And the same holds for an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances. In the Superman kind of sense, if you have all the power anyway, it's kind of less interesting, right? Heroes should be ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, because the most important part that we need to relate to is the individual, not the circumstance. We can take on character traits, we can implement strategies, but we cannot choose our circumstances, for the most part.
But what do I mean by interesting? I'm saying certain combination, let's say the ordinary and the extraordinary is more interesting. You got that contrast. Am I only talking about being entertained? Well, no. The real purpose of having a hero, I think, is to learn we need to see what is possible. What matters is the information content that we can glean from witnessing and admiring an individual go up against difficult odds. Now, let's add a bit of rigor to this discussion. Okay?
We're going to think about doing a computer simulation and trying to quantify some things. And I'll keep the jargon out of this episode. If you want some of the details, go check out my article on medium. And medium nontrivial. I kind of go into some of the hairier details of this.
But for the sake of the episode, let's just talk about things like disorder information and pattern and how that kind of adds some rigor to the notion that if you're going to choose a hero, it makes the most sense to take an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstances versus some of the other combinations you might have.
Now, the reason that ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances make for a better hero is because onlookers, the people who are admiring these heroes, can perceive better information, right, about dealing with situations. So imagine we're going to do this kind of little simplistic simulation. It's going to be just a square. Think of it like a box, basically. And in that box, we're going to put a bunch of obstacles. So two dimensional or three dimensional, however you want to visualize this.
So there's a bunch of obstacles in that box. We'll just do three dimensions. And you're going to have two types of individual that go in that box who have the same goal. They each want to avoid the obstacles. That's the goal here. Okay? So the blue ball is going to be like an ordinary person. And he's going to navigate or move throughout that box. And again, his only goal is just to avoid the obstacles. So imagine there's, like, 50 obstacles inside that box. You just have to avoid them. Okay?
And then the red ball is going to be like a superhero or someone with superhuman ability. Or the more realistic version of that might be like someone with infinite resources or something who can just kind of maybe pass the risk on to someone else because they have so much money or something like this. Right? So blue ball is the ordinary person. That's like you and me. And then the extraordinary person is going to be a superhero with essentially omnipotent powers. Now, the blue ball is going to.
If you looked at the blue ball move throughout this box, you would notice that it strategically kind of maneuvers himself, himself around these obstacles. So imagine the ball is leaving a path behind him as he moves. So if you were to look at that path, you would notice there's quite a bit of predictability to the path. Because you can tell what that blue ball is doing. Right? Again, the blue ball is the ordinary person. You can see him kind of negotiate around the obstacles.
In the case of the red ball, the superhero, it also leaves a path. But if you look at the superhero path, it's very erratic, because what the superhero we're going to say can do is teleport. The superhero, when it runs into an obstacle, it doesn't try to negotiate or use strategy. It just teleports to a brand new location. So it's kind of like the Batman versus.
But, you know, you could also think of just regular, you know, average Joe or whoever might kind of negotiate or call upon resources or do whatever he has to do to negotiate around those obstacles. Whereas someone with, like, unlimited resources or whatever would be able to just, quote, unquote, teleport to a brand new location and kind of just shuffle off the problem, if you will. So you'll notice the blue ball navigating around the obstacles.
That's like somebody negotiating using their powers of reason or strategy, right, to resolve a difficult situation. Whereas the red ball has got these omnipotent powers, they can teleport to new locations. And again, a real world analogy might be like a super rich person with unlimited resources or something. And so then you notice the difference in the paths that they draw out. And you can think of the difference between those paths in terms of the amount of disorder they have, right.
The blue path by the ordinary person, we look at it, and we get what's happening. It doesn't have a lot of erratic behavior. It's not disordered. It's quite predictable. If you do the same for the superhero, it looks very erratic because they're teleporting. Their path is all over the place. And so you can look at those two paths, and you can kind of quantify the amount of information in those paths, basically by thinking about how erratic they are or how disordered they are.
And so when you try to quantify information, when you do that, the way that you approach that is you say, the more surprise something has, the more information it has. And that's because if something is surprising, then it's interesting, right? We value it. For example, if I told you there are two sides to a coin, well, that doesn't contain any information, because you already knew that there's nothing interesting there, right?
But if I told you the longest lived shark is 300, 500 years old or something like that, then that might surprise you if you didn't know that, because there's a lot of uncertainty there that got resolved. Right? In other words, the more surprising something is, the more information content it has. Okay, so if you look at the blue ball, which is the ordinary person, you would say, well, there's not a lot of information content there because it's very predictable, not that surprising.
And if you take a look at the red superhero path, it's very erratic, it's very disordered, you would say, well, that one is more surprising because I can barely tell what he's doing is all over the place. And so it's a much more surprising thing to do to see someone teleport or maybe see someone throw a million dollars at a problem, like it didn't even matter kind of thing. Right. Now, this might be a little bit confusing, because wait a second.
If the red ball superhero has more surprise, right? More disorder, and therefore more information content, doesn't that make the superhero more informative and thus a better choice for those looking to learn? A better choice as a hero. And that seems to go against what I just said, because this whole episode, I've been saying the correct choice is the ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstances, not the superhero type person or the extraordinary person in the ordinary circumstance. Right?
Again. The better hero is the one that's going to be more informative, the one that has better information for us. To learn. And so this kind of touches on a deeper issue at the heart of relating information to the patterns that we see.
If you are talking about the information content in terms of kind of machines talking to machines, then essentially more randomness does mean more information because it's harder to encode or compress a message if it's got a lot of uncertainty to it, if it's got more randomness to it, right? Because there's not obvious pattern to take advantage of when you're going to, let's say, compress the message. Okay?
In other words, if we're thinking just kind of machines talking to machines, if you see kind of more erraticness or randomness, it basically just means it's going to be harder to shrink that file size into a smaller size, that file into a smaller size, because you can't take advantage of redundancies and things like this. And so in kind of purely transactional terms, we would say there's more information content to this thing that we're trying to squish down into a digital form.
But the problem with that, when we talk about humans, people who are looking at things and trying to say something is informative, is it would suggest that more randomness just means more information in general. And of course, if you take that to the extreme, that's problematic because complete randomness can't be the most amount of information. In fact, complete randomness is effectively no information. So something doesn't make sense there.
And so when I say this gets to a deeper issue at the heart of relating information to pattern, we have to realize that, yes, information is valuable and informative when it's something we didn't see coming. And so randomness in some sense adds to the noise, right? That makes it harder to uncover what's important. But past a point, more randomness does not conceal more information because what's informative is pattern. And if you have too much randomness, there's just no pattern there. Okay?
So we got to think more. Less about how machines are transacting and more about how humans consider something to be important. That's the information that we're after, and that's what's going to make sense when we talk about things like choosing a hero, right? Because that's what we would consider informative. It's a pattern that we can benefit from, okay? People consider something informative when they find meaning. And meaning comes from pattern.
Adding disorder to a string of text doesn't necessarily mean as a meaningful message just waiting to be discovered, right? Humans think of something as informative when they can detect the pattern pattern recognition, which is what people do all the time. Yes, it does involve surprisal and even compression, because the abstractions we make in our mind is a type of compression. Right.
But real world patterns, the ones that humans care about, the ones that we would call informative, exist somewhere between total order and complete random. Somewhere in between. Right? So in other words, surprisal and compression alone don't seem to cut it when it comes to a working definition of information. In other words, going back to our little toy simulation of the.
You got these obstacles in a box, and you've got the blue ball negotiating around very strategically, and then you got the blue ball, which is a superhero and just teleports to random locations. I don't think anybody would say, oh, that superhero is much more informative because we can't relate to it, we can't do anything with it. It's just a kind of random behavior. Right.
But the blue ball, who was more like an ordinary person, using strategy, you can look upon that strategy and you can learn something from it. Right. Obviously, the real world would be more involved in a ball bouncing around a box, but you would be able to look at how that ball is negotiating around the turns and take that into consideration. And that's what we would call more informative.
Okay, so just by visual inspection that humans do for pattern recognition, for the most part, we're excellent at this task for evolutionary reasons. Right. So what can we do about this? Well, I think rather than looking at just kind of the raw surprisal of the two paths. Right. Which one's more surprising? Which doesn't seem to work with our human intuition of information, we instead need to look for the best pattern as the most informative. Right.
But recall that we set out to be rigorous here, we still need something we can measure. And this idea of surprisal, of what's more surprising, what's more disordered, is really the best way to do this in many ways, for this concept of information. So even though it seems to only kind of work with machines, in some sense, it's still nice and rigorous. It's quantifiable. You can calculate it. Okay, so I think we need to combine them.
I think we need to somehow take a look at the disorder difference between the paths and use that to measure the level of information, but somehow relate that to the pattern that humans appreciate. Okay, so how might we do this? Well, I believe the answer is related to how we take into account the environment. If we only saw the blue ball's path and not the obstacles that are inside that box, we might consider the blue ball's movement just as random as the red balls. Right?
Maybe it's not as quick and jumpy, but it's still kind of just moving in different locations. If we don't see the obstacles, we aren't necessarily going to learn anything. We wouldn't even really call it much of a pattern. But seeing the environment allows us to make the critical distinction between the two paths. We can see what the blue ball is doing, and we can understand that it's real. It does not violate our innate sense of physics like the superheroes does. Right?
So we can still use the convenience of kind of mathematically or rigorously defining information in terms of how random or surprising something is. Right? Get that? Nice, precise definition there. But we can also include the environment. And the way to do this is what I'm going to call a hero index. If we can take the ratio of the information content of the hero, which is just how crazy is their pattern, right. The crazier it is, the more information is there, because it's more surprising.
And the definition of information is essentially how much surprise is contained in the thing you're looking at. Okay, so we can take a ratio of the information content of that hero, how erratic the path is, and then do the same thing for the environment. In other words, how crazy is the environment, how erratic is the environment? And what you could do, I would say, is you could take essentially the surprise of the environment and divide it by the surprise of the hero.
And the reason why you might want to do this is because then this so called hero index, as I'm calling it, will end up giving the highest value to what we have an intuitive sense about, which is the best type of hero would be this ordinary person in an extraordinary environment. If you do the hero index, it's going to be higher for those types of heroes because they're more relatable.
Because if you're taking the ratio of the surprise of the environment divided by the surprise of the Hero, the surprise of the hero is in the denominator. And so the smaller that is, the higher the overall index goes. Right. And so if you have a kind of recognizable or relatable hero, it's like looking at the blue ball's path. It's fairly predictable. I understand what I'm looking at. It's something I believe I could do myself. The amount of surprise is low, okay.
But less surprise in the hero is not a hindrance to learning as long as the environment is high in surprisal. Okay, now, the numerator of our little ratio here, the top part, right above the line, is the amount of surprise in the environment. And that's exactly where the high uncertainty should be. That's where the surprise should be, because that means a genuine battleground is there to test the characteristics we can relate to. Okay, so I'm just going to pull back from this.
Do a little quick recap just so you can understand how it flows into this index. And this is not about being technical. This is, as I'll argue, giving you just kind of a nice way to have a conceptual heuristic of how to assess heroes in your life, which I think is really important. So we said at the beginning, it makes sense that people have heroes. They can inspire people, but more to the point, they can show what's possible. And even more to the point, teach us something. Right.
You can learn by observing one or more individuals and how you might fold in similar traits or strategies into your own life. Right? And then I said that there's different ways that heroes get portrayed. It can be the extraordinary individual in an ordinary environment, or the ordinary environment individual in the extraordinary environment. And I said, those are the two we tend to see because they set up the contrast, and contrast as interesting.
But more to the point, it's not about being entertained. It's really about learning. And then I said, there's a problem with the. One of those versions, which is the extraordinary individual in the ordinary environment. The extra intelligent, the extra creative, the quirky, the nerdy, the super altruistic. And I said, because if you look at that, that individual, I think people get attracted to it for wrong reasons, and it's not relatable.
Ultimately, the take home message is when it comes to things that you can do yourself. If we're being honest, we can't really relate to those extraordinary, exaggerated personalities because I don't think they exist. But the inverse of an ordinary person in the extraordinary circumstances, not only is that real and that can exist, we can relate to those traits, and those are the things we can take on.
We can't really control the environment, but we can take on the traits of an ordinary hero, right? We can not just admire them, but look at the strategy. Look at how they go up against the challenges, their challenges. And the fact that those ordinary people are in an extraordinary environment provides the contrast we need. Because we should see how relatable traits that we ourselves could take on get tested in extreme environments, you need that contrast to really produce the learning. Okay?
And then we said, okay, so we want to be rigorous about this. So we need a way to kind of measure information or really define what is information and what information is in an information theoretic, scientific kind of approach is to say, essentially it's the amount of surprise. If something is more surprising, it's deemed more informative, because if it's more surprising, you didn't know it was there. And so that counts as information.
But the way that you think about surprise is in terms of randomness or disorder. The more disordered something is, the more surprising it's going to be if you resolve the pattern beneath it. And this works really well for machines that have to do things like data compression, right, and encoding and things like that.
But logically, if you take that to the extreme, that would suggest that more randomness is by default more information, which of course is not true, because humans aren't really looking so much for the amount of disorder in something as a level of information. They're looking for pattern. It's pattern that we deem informative. And so we've got this kind of beautiful way of defining information rigorously, which is through the level of surprise or disorder of something.
It's something you can precisely define. But then you've got this need to kind of map it to the human intuition of what information is, which is the recognition of pattern. And so I said, okay, I think the way to bring these together is through what I'm calling the hero index. We can still quantify information. We can still define it precisely by saying, yes, it is the level of surprise. It is the level of disorder or randomness you're looking at.
But if you take into account not only the specific thing you're looking at, which in our case is the hero, the individual, but you also take into account the environment, and you take a ratio between those two. You take a ratio of how surprising the environment is to how surprising the hero is. Literally, if you had a number for the surprise, which in machine terms, you would calculate, and I'll argue what this means for humans in a bit.
But if you just take the number for the amount of surprise in the environment, obviously a more demanding environment is more chaotic, disordered. It's more surprising. And you were to divide that by the number you get for how surprising your hero is, right? Then you would get a number that reflects the best type of information, the most informative, the best situation between individual and environment that can teach you something.
And this gives the highest hero index to the ordinary individual in the extraordinary environment. Okay? And again, you can calculate the level of surprise or the amount of information for the hero just by looking how disordered their path is. And you can do the same thing for the environment by looking at all those obstacles and how essentially the way you do this is if you take that cube, let's say our simulation, and you say, okay, there's 50 obstacles in that cube.
And now you say, how many different ways can those obstacles arrange themselves? And that would essentially give you just how disordered, surprising, or informative, if you will, based on information content is in that environment, right? So just think, in the real world, if I walk into an empty parking lot and there's no cars, that's not that surprising of an environment.
If I walk into a parking lot with 50 cars and some of them are parked and some of them are driving and some of them are getting into fender benders, that's a much more surprising information loaded environment. Okay? So by taking the ratio of the two, it assigns the index the highest to the situation that I think is truly the best for admiring a hero. More importantly, learning from a hero, okay, because the information content of the hero is low, it's in the denominator that makes it go high.
If the information content of the environment is high, that also makes it go high. And those other combinations of individual and environment don't get as high of a rating. The ordinary person in the ordinary environment, right? The extraordinary person in the ordinary environment. Only the ordinary person in the extraordinary environment gets the highest rating. Okay. So we do all that. Hopefully that made sense as a ratio, or at least conceptually.
But of course, in the real world, we can't be expected to go calculate surprise numbers, right? You're not going to go in a parking lot and be like, okay, what number would I associate with the surprisal of this, the level of disorder of this environment? Nor would you do that for looking at a hero, fictional or nonfictional. You're not going to go look at a know Nikolai Tesla and say, well, how much? If that's my hero, that's who inspires me. What level of surprise can I associate him?
Nobody's going to do that. In the real world, we can't be expected to kind of calculate these numbers, right, let alone the environments they operate in. But doing the calculation for a simplified simulation in that cube and using all its kind of overly idealistic constraints actually gave us a nice anchor to understand some critical concepts in our own lives.
We can apply the hero index as a conceptual heuristic right, we should be choosing heroes who are both relatable and who face extreme situations. The hero index that I was talking about suggests that if it is these heroes who provide us with more than just fleeting inspiration, they provide us the best opportunities to learn things we can use. Okay. When it comes to real people, historical or alive, we need to avoid the survivorship bias.
We need to not look for the so called geniuses or legends, quote unquote, and instead focus on those who were quite ordinary yet operate in extreme but familiar situations. There are numerous accounts of Mahatma Gandhi being a remarkably relatable person. He lived a simple and modest life. He had empathy for the poor and downtrodden. He encouraged regular people to meet him and discuss their issues.
Gandhi made mistakes, and he had his fair share of failures to which he admitted related to nonviolence and the non cooperation movement and things like this. And yet Gandhi played a pivotal role in India's independence movement. Undoubtedly an extreme situation. What are some other examples of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances? Oscar Schindler, right? The german businessman and member of the n*** party who's really just an ordinary industrialist.
And he was seeking to profit from the war using jewish labor in his factories. And yet he became horrified by the n*** atrocities, and he ended up risking his life and fortune to protect jewish workers, right? Oscar saved the lives of more than 1200 jews. And this was during the Holocaust. And so, of course, an extreme situation, to say the least. You've got Rosa Parks. She was just a housekeeper, a seamstress.
But in her activism, she refused to give up her bus seat, as we all know, to the white passenger. And this was despite the extreme segregationist laws at the time. She had Ku Klux Klan members marching down her street, and her grandfather was guarding the door with a gun and all this kind of stuff. So again, ordinary person, extraordinary circumstances, rising up to those extraordinary circumstances. You think about these traits of these people, the characteristics, their attributes.
Gandhi had modesty, empathy and self effacement. Schindler had compassion, resourcefulness and courage. Parks had determination, resilience, and a profound dignity. These are all relatable and achievable traits steeped within a world that actively worked in opposition to such qualities. On the fictional side, we already saw how Batman, under this context, makes a more informative hero than Superman. And there are many others.
I mean, you would have to choose who you believe is worth relating to, right? But they must be relatable. Choosing eccentric personalities or quote unquote, geniuses means you're buying into false narratives about how people accomplish things. I don't think there is such thing as a genius. And for some of you, it may be rooted in your desire to be seen a certain way. And you got to kind of be honest with yourself.
Now, fiction can actually be even a better kind of account of heroes than real world, because beyond being less susceptible to survivorship bias, fiction can exaggerate the environment to better contrast ordinary traits and strategies from the world they operate in. Remember, as I stated previously, we can all take on character traits and implement strategies, but we cannot choose our environment. Well, we can kind of choose our environment, but we can't really choose our circumstances, right?
So better to see what we can control highlighted by what fiction does best, creating worlds beyond what we normally experience. A hero is someone who is admired for their outstanding achievements. It's good to be inspired and even better to learn how to deal with real world situations. But there is a difference between the way society portrays heroes.
We can look to those who are portrayed as extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances, which I think we see a lot of, or ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Only the latter reveals the kind of information that goes beyond entertainment, teaching us the most important lesson that all of us can achieve truly great things. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, take care.