*Horoscope* Here’s your horoscope for today: You’re outgoing yet reserved, and your behavior is largely determined by your mood and the people around you. You’re resourceful and an independent thinker, and you worry about not properly being able to tap your latent potential. You’re a free soul and you work best in liberty and freedom from confining restrictions. Experiences have taught you that people aren’t what they seem on the exterior. You also pride yourself on having an individual viewpoint, although your environment does not adequately provide you an opportunity to do so. Also, if you believed all that, you’re an idiot because none of the above is true and I just made all that up, eating KurKure. Kids, welcome to Busting the Myth 101. And for those of you who salivated over the ‘accurate’ horoscope, congratulations! You’ve just been a victim of the Barnum Effect, which I shall discuss later in the article. To begin with, I am a big fan of newspapers. However, there’s one column that makes my face twitch uncontrollably- horoscopes. Largely dubbed as a ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ generation, we unfortunately still find horoscopes managing their way into newspaper spaces that could’ve been utilized for some more enriching, raging and informative news, like Mulayam Singh’s misogynistic statements and announcement of Rakhi ka Swayamvar Season 24. Jokes apart, I firmly believe that horoscopes (or even Mulayam Singh for that matter) have no place in a civilized society. Why? Because apparently, 1) Researchers have found that if the star signs are removed from their respective horoscopes, people are unable to identify which paragraph belongs to their own sign. However, once the signs are included, almost all of them consider their star sign to be most accurate. Two words: Confirmation bias. 2) Believing that your qualities and abilities are functions of the month on which you were born rather than of hard work and intelligence is a fallacious view point that might be detrimental in the long run. Such beliefs soon evolve into tendencies of resignation to fate, and principles that dictate that ‘destiny’ determines the outcome, and attempts can’t change the pre-decided outcome. Now for the aforementioned Barnum Effect- It states that when people read what they believe to be their horoscopes, they tend to read more meaning into the lines that fit, and subconsciously disregard and ignore the ones that don’t. The formation of clubs like ‘asaram bapu roxxxxx’ can be traced to a manifestation of this very effect. Therefore, horoscopes are as useless as solar flashlights, or voting for Rahul Gandhi. So dear reader, do yourself a favor and rip apart that horoscope (and Rahul Gandhi). But, while I’m at this, let’s talk about superstition. Everyone has a lucky mascot. Some have special socks, Hindus have special rocks, while the Indian cricket team has Poonam Pandey. Sachin has a crotch trick and Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth believe in verbal expurgation. All of us attribute success to our mascots. But, do these mascots really deserve the credit? Turns out, no. Suppose you’ve been buying lottery tickets every week for the past twenty years, but in vain. However, once you ask your son to buy the ticket, and, as luck would have it, you win the lottery. Now unlike a minuscule percentage of the population which has no trouble with 7th grade probability, you decide to attribute the win to your son. He now becomes your lucky mascot. It was a simple correlation; your son bought the ticket, and you won. However, you mistake it for causation. Because your son bought the ticket, you won. This correlation causation confusion causes a lot of problems to all same people on earth- yes, all four of them. Correlation does not mean causation. Just because X and Y happened together doesn’t mean the X caused Y or vice versa. It could be pure coincidence. Idiot: Hitler was an atheist. Hitler killed people. Therefore atheists kill people. !@#*$!@& Jai maratha!!!! The above argument is as sane as this one: My grandfather died. Christopher Columbus also died. Therefore, Christopher Columbus was my grandfather. You see the problem now, don’t you? This brings me to yet another problem- the fallacy of statistics. Samajwadi Party Extremist: In the last year under SP rule, the number of rape cases solved increased by 100%. That’s higher than any other states’. Perfectly sane person: Dude, you just solved two cases this year. SP Extremist: Last year, it was one. So technically… See? Statistics are misleading, devious and never present a clear picture. Random Minister- I was elected four years ago. The crime rate has fallen by 28% in the past two years. Sounds impressive? No. This statistic doesn’t include the overall trend of the country. What if it decreased by 40-50% in rest of the states but just by 28% in this one? Also, it doesn’t account for change in laws. What if few crimes where shifted to under the umbrella of ‘civil felony’ and were not included in this survey? And what if the crime had risen by 70-80% in the two years after the minister’s election, and moderated in the subsequent years? That would still mean an overall increase in the rate. Thus, never trust statistics and politicians (or even Poonam Pandey, if you’re Yuvraj Singh). None of them give a clear picture. #TAWFanarchy.80 Arnav Agarwal
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 09:30:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015