5 most common mistakes of men #2

(The art of thinking wrong)



Part B
"Mistake Rule and Exception"
(The most used strategy to hide one's own laziness)

I see a lot of people outside there using the few exceptions to some obvious rule in order to dismiss the truth and continue believing whatever unreal arbitrary fantasy they have made for themselves or for the whole World.
It is a strategy that can be easily used to deny or justify almost anything, any point of view, any idea or whatever.

Example:
-"Dogs walk on four legs"
-"Yes but yesterday I saw a dog walking on just three legs, so it is not true that dogs walk on four legs"

For practical purposes if 99% of dogs walk on four legs you can safely say that dogs do walk in four legs.

This tactic is used by example to attack capitalism:
"Last Sunday I saw on TV the CEO of that big corporation going to jail for fraud: All the capitalist system is corrupt, money and ambition are the roots of all evil!" (quite fashionable these days with the current financial crisis going on)
Meaning: I don't believe in capitalism because I was told since my childhood that it is evil, then I will try to find any little justification to sustain my wrong opinion and never see the reality that 99% of the CEOs of a vast majority of companies are honest, competent, hard-working people, sometimes brilliant. (more brilliant than me for sure...)

Mistaking rule and exception is most of the times a way to hide our own mental laziness for accepting the rules, the facts, the reality and learn and change our mind.
It is failing to see the "measure" of the facts and the reality. It is failing to see the big picture and take the appropriate perspective in order to avoid a tree obstructing the view of the whole wood.

In practical life, specially concerning human affairs, it is imperative knowing the "statistic incidence" of an occurrence in order to form a correct opinion. It is not enough to feel unsafe just seeing in the news that someone in your neighborhood was robbed...

How much people are robbed in a month or a year?
1% don't worry, your neighborhood is still safe
10% your neighborhood is not that safe...
30% your neighborhood is definitely dangerous!
70% move now!! you are about to be robbed!!

The same thing occurs in the real-physical World with "tolerances", since perfection rarely exists.
Perfection is a delusion depending of the detail of measurement.

You could think that the surface of the glass of your living room's table is perfectly smooth and flat, but if you see it thru a microscope you will discover that at some scale of measurement this seems to be not totally true...
It is not flat and smooth anymore? Yes it is!
(Between the logical tolerances in a given context it is)
For all your practical purposes it still is

Conclusion: Only people not willing to be aware of the "measure" and the context of reality can dismiss a rule because of an exception, living in a world of delusions, always judging the reality by unreal "lifeboat" exceptional situations that finally never occur.

The same lifeboat that will not save their failed lives, when someday just before to die they finally realize that they wasted their existence.