I was sick before my accounts exam and had to visit the doctor. I was suffering from vomiting and fatigue. The doctor advised me to take a few pills and take rest. If anything continued, I was to take a blood test. My father also had a similar problem of a body ache and fatigue. Needless to say, nothing happened to us and we returned home happy. I found myself able to study for 6 hours more.
In hindsight, I was under a fallacy.
To summarise how I realised:
- I was sick
- I went to the doctor at 5 pm
- The doctor advised me stuff
- I came back energised and happy without medicines
If you look harder, nothing really happened. The doctor did absolutely nothing to help me with my sickness. I just got the idea in my mind that the doctor helped me cure my sickness in a dramatic way. However, he was quite useless. I agree that the medicines later on helped, but after leaving the clinic, I immediately began feeling better and I hadn’t taken my medications until before dinner which was at 9:30 pm.
Now, to speak in general:
Whenever we are under duress of any kind and we visit somebody who can help us with it. Our mind forms an idea that no matter what happens, we will get better. often, the doctor does not need to do anything except prescribe medicines. Even with this, we will still feel better because our mind has come to believe that visiting the doctor’s clinic has helped us in recovery. This can also be applied to a shrink. Troubled people often visit shrinks who listens to their problems and asks them very basic questions. The fact that the patient is in the shrink’s clinic and is lying down forces the patient to think and come to conclusions on his own.
however, even though psychiatrists and doctors may sound useless, it is obvious that they are essential to society.
Another fallacy I noticed in the doctor’s clinic was from my mother. The doctor told my family there there was a small chance that I had dengue. On the way back, my mother hyped up that ‘small’ chance so much that it seemed that I actually had dengue and took all possible precautions to treat me. This is obviously motherly love but I realised something
Small possibilities are severely overestimated.
Take an example.
Let’s say that you are a test subject for a medical pill. You are offered an enormous sum of money for ingesting the pill. The pill has a 95% chance of of nothing happening and a 5% chance that you might die. I can guarantee that if you are not aware of this fallacy, you will not take part in the experiment.
now, let’s break down the specifics:
The chance of you dying from the pill is equivalent to you getting killed by just walking on the road. At any given time, a persona has a 5% chance of dying on the road. This just goes to show how low the chances of your demise truly are.
You will overestimate the 5% because it is something so important: your life. 5% will be illusion as 50% to you and even if you do undergo the experiment, you will always have that catch in your throat that you could die.
Let me assert this: you cannot die.
so, we can learn from my mother, that whenever posed with a question of possibilities, we should always let go of personal fears or any other biases and look at the chance of failure from an objective point of view. This can help in clearing our thoughts and even win us a lot of gambling money.
