Last week in stats, we took our test about sampling and experimental design. One of the main ideas of that unit that we had to drill in is that experiments have randomly assigned treatments and controls that the experimenters perform on subjects, and only experiments can determine causation instead of just correlation. 

 

When I got home after that test, my grandmother told me, “ I saw this thing on the TV9 Drushyam YouTube channel where if you do extreme penance, you can be in cold weather without any winter gear. Look at this guy.” And I saw a sage who was wearing only a robe just walking around in the middle of the Himalayas during winter. Needless to say, I was amazed, but because stats was still in my brain, I thought to myself, “This isn’t even a proper observational study, let alone an experiment. There’s no way of telling whether this is even true, let alone whether it works for others.” Both my grandmother and I knew this was fake and laughed it off when I said that I would do penance and play with my dog outside in only a robe during winter to practice becoming this guy. In the week since I’ve been thinking a little about not only our gullibility but also how we believe that what works for others works for us. 

I was pretty gullible as a kid. When I was 8 or so, some of my friends would gang up on me by telling me a story at lunch and adding more details until I believed it. Most people are smarter than eight-year-old me and don’t believe obvious things like the guy who was walking around in the Himalayas, but they might believe a simple statistic like “80% of students haven’t touched a book outside of class.” Even though we don’t know whether it is right or not, we still believe things because we’re not really paying attention. Besides, these little numbers and facts usually don’t matter in our lives. However, they still make an impact. During the early college app season, I didn’t apply to some schools because I thought that their acceptance rates were lower than they actually were, just because I heard a number from a friend who heard it from a parent’s cousin without actually checking for myself. Some base their life philosophies on things that are exaggerated or untrue; for example, my relatives who think the world is scarier than it actually is just because of seeing news headlines all day. Of course, we shouldn’t lose trust in others just for the sake of not being gullible, however, I think that whenever we’re doing something and a relevant fact pops up in our heads, like the acceptance rate numbers, we should try to think of where we heard that fact, or whether its true or not. I’ve been trying this over the past week and realized the countless little things I believed without real evidence. 

 

Another thing that we do a lot that I was thinking about is copying others and expecting the same result for us. An example is trying to stay up all night after the one kid who got an A on the test also stayed up all night studying. Even assuming that that kid is telling the truth, going back to the stats stuff, its impossible to be certain that something will work without designing an experiment with controls and randomization. There could be confounding variables such as having background knowledge or using better resources. I’m not saying that we need experiments for everything because you can’t just make people participate in an experiment when they have other things going on in their lives, or that we shouldn’t look to others for inspiration, but I think that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we did what everyone successful did and didn’t succeed. At the end of the day, 90% of success is luck*, and it’s physically and mentally unhealthy to blindly follow others all the time. If I followed that sage’s penance to be able to be coldproof, I would probably just get severe hypothermia before achieving anything.

 

A lot of the time, I just believe things or follow others because there’s too many things to worry about to stress about each of them. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I think it’s important to know where my priorities are and double check those areas without just copying others.

*Also, 90% of statistics are made up.