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.
This isn’t from the video but it looked like this.
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.
Um Ekchulee, 100% of all statistics are made up. 🤓
I think the thing that initially made me take statistics was the Dream speedrunning drama, and I think that’s a perfect example of your point. The drama in short started when Dream was accused of being too lucky with the randomness in his speedrunning. A team did the math, and calculated the chances of being as or more lucky than him as 1/7.5 trillion. It instantly set the internet ablaze, when Dream did come out with a response, he got a Harvard Astrophysicist, who specialized in Astro-statistics (whatever that is) to debunk the original paper, instead coming with a much less condemning 1/100 million chance.
I don’t know why, but it caught a lot of my attention, and I found myself reading the long 30 page papers, explaining pretty much all the concepts that we covered in AP Statistics, and much more (things like p-hacking). The thing is, while both teams used pretty similar methods, they were able to come to astronomically different odds. And, despite the majority of the communities having never read the papers, the statistics were enough to convince them of Dream’s guilt, or innocence. (Even though 1/100 million is still “convincing statistical evidence” of his guilt.) This incident just showcased to me two things, 1: it pretty much taught me the entire content of AP Statistics, and 2: the power of statistics to convince people, even if they don’t know what it means.
This was a really insightful blog post Deeraj! As someone who is also in AP Statistics, I can fully appreciate the content of this post, and the necessity of always conducting one’s own research before drawing a seemingly unbelievable conclusion. Thank you also for bringing up college applications, since the “statistics” around them are incredibly dubious, even if they are coming from friends who have already graduated. Things change every year, and it is important that we, as seniors, keep up to date on the new data that many colleges publicly display. Beyond this, I really empathize with your story about your childhood, since I was also very frequently told some of the fantastical stories that permeated much of elementary and middle school. That being said, we have both become rational individuals so I guess we can leave the past behind and move forward into hopefully a more holistically intelligent future.
Deeraj, I really like how you connected your own life experiences to what we are learning in AP stats. I think it’s hilarious how some YouTubers try to get away with making bogus claims to their audiences and expect us to believe them without even having proper experimentation! I also liked how you discussed the importance of verifying data. One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes when I’m having conversations with other high school students they will just make up statistics that they think sound reasonable. I think that it’s important that you brought up how sometimes we don’t question these statistics until much later because they might negatively affect us in the time that we believe them. When we are exposed to many facts every day through social media and the internet, I think it’s especially crucial that we look out for whether a source is actually valid or if it cannot be backed up by the principles of statistics.