Example...
I closed my eyes and walked across the road, I reached the other side safely, thus, I conclude that crossing the road without looking is safe.
Sounds silly? Well... let's bring this thought to other topics.
What about smokers?
I know of smokers who smoked their whole lives and they didn't care about their health. They know of smokers who lived til 80-90 years old... So to them, nothing has happened yet... and they don't believe that anything WILL happen... Until they got a heart attack... Then suddenly 100% stopped smoking.
Isn't this similar to closing their eyes and crossing the road? Everyday smoke no issue, then eventually, the statistics caught up with them.
What if in 20 years, the climate gets cooler?
Then the climate change deniers would all say... SEE I TOLD YOU! CLIMATE CHANGE IS A HOAX.
And maybe as someone who used to believe in climate change, you may think... "Hey... that's true, the scientist's predictions didn't come true. So next time I won't believe them as much."
Potentially, there will be more people who would change their minds about climate change.
There will be some/few people who may look into the data and find out that maybe for the past 20 years, humans have taken additional steps to prevent climate change from becoming disastrous.
To prove the the climate change deniers that climate change exists... well... then we need the Earth to be even more screwed up... which I think none of us wants to happen.
In my old company, we analyzed the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Basically, there was a space craft meant to fly, engineers realized a design issue, if the temperature at the time of take off was too low, the rubber rings meant to keep gas from leaking would freeze and the gas would leak and would PROBABLY cause a disaster.
However, the space craft had taken off many times in warmer temperatures and... No issue...
And since the official take off had been delayed for many times, NASA decided to go against engineer recommendations and decided to launch the space craft even though the temperature was cold on that day.
Well... BOOM.
The point is... sometimes, success doesn't mean something is right. It could just mean luck, or a lack of understanding.
What IF, NASA ordered the launch AND the space craft didn't BOOM?
Would we have any lesson to learn? No right? NASA would just tell the engineers, "See I told you no problem."
In this example, we would come to very different conclusions depending on the result of the launch.
If the launch succeeded, what would people have said and learnt? Take risks? No guts no glory?
If the launch failed, which it did, then people would learn a different lesson.
In our parents era, many of our parents didn't go to university. They saw other folks who went to university and became successful, rich, so their conclusion was, go to university and life will be easy for their kids. To them, the degree would be the SOURCE of fortune for their kids.
BUT, think about someone from our parents era who was not educated, but he started a business and also became rich and successful. What would he teach his kids? He would probably also want his kids to go to university, but he would probably understand that the degree is not necessarily the source of fortune for his kids. He would teach different things to his kids.
When I was younger, I thought there was no such thing as love your job. Cos it never happened to me. So I could never understand it. I thought it was not possible, so I concluded that it didn't exist. That everyone doesn't really like their jobs, and that at best, people were just cruising along and just making money. Until I discussed this with my wife and then I got another perspective. That such a thing IS possible.
This blog probably wouldn't exist if I found a job that I loved in my early years.
We read about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jack Ma, Mark Zukerburg, we think, anyone can be a billionaire, they just have to be smart and work hard and want it enough... But is this true? It's just marketing of the idea of the billionaire. We never hear of the thousands or millions of failures who were also smart and hardworking. Cos... there's no media coverage for them. We don't ever consider the element of luck, the right place, right time, meeting the right person.
The thing is... we don't see a lot of things. Cos basically, it didn't happen. And cos it didn't happen we didn't learn from it. Or we come to a wrong conclusion, or we arrive at an incomplete conclusion.
Think about this... What if you were born into a billionaire family? How would your world view change? What would you think about retirement? About your job? About opportunities?
How about what if you were born into a super poor family? How then would your world view change?
What would you think about retirement? Education? Opportunities? Food on the table?
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