How Many Times is Enough?
March 05, 2009
Time is all relative. For some insects, a few weeks is a lifetime. For a rodent, a few years at most. For a dog, 10 or 15 years. For a person, 75 to 100 years max. For an empire, maybe a few hundred years. Weather cycles may change in the course of a 1000 years or more. Geologic events, 100,000 to a few million years.
As humans, we process information, we observe and take in, and we draw conclusions from it. The danger however is that we only take in a limited amount of information. If the occurrence we are looking for does not happen during the time we are collecting information, we may falsely conclude that what we are checking for NEVER HAPPENS.
Here's a simple example. Let's say you drive your car to work, and you leave your car parked with the windows down and your car unlocked for a whole year. During that whole year, if nothing was ever stolen from your car, would it be a good conclusion that no cars ever get broken into at your work? What if the rate that cars in that area are broken into was 1 per 1000 every day. The simple law of averages tells you that you're likely to be robbed once in about 1000 days, or just under 3 years. It is not surprising then, that after one year nothing bad had happened, yet one year of doing something every day and getting the same result can easily give a false sense of assurance that really isn't there. If you continue to leave your car unlocked, then the simple law of averages (statistics) will tell you that you have about a 60% change of getting robbed at least once in 3 years, and about 95% chance of being robbed at least once in 10 years.
This whole concept is a really big problem for young people, because to them, 10 years can feel like forever. A lot of things that they have never seen happen, they conclude will never happen.
Unfortunately, older people have this same problem to. Two days ago, the stock market hit a 12 year low. Many individual stocks hit 20 year or 25 year lows. A lot of investors got caught in something they never dreamed could happen.
What's the lesson? Learn from your experiences, but that's no substitute for being a student of history. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. I wish I would have thought of that!
-- Greg