Kind of Part, Kind of Whole
Several years ago, I remember a discussion my friends and I were having about food, and suddenly the topic of spices came up, particularly cloves. We had each seen them being used in various dishes but never actually eaten any. It seemed logical to our young minds that they should be tasty by themselves since they were used in delicious meals. One boy decided he just had to find out and snuck a few out of his lunch after being goaded by my classmates. He ended up running out of class because he couldn’t bear the taste, leading to a lecture from our teacher on why lunch has to be eaten during lunch break only.
Another instance I remember was during the preparation for a wedding. There were miniature cupcakes that were to be served as finger food being baked en masse in a giant oven. The usual baker was missing that day, and a substitute was on duty instead. He checked one tray of a batch that was just done and realized it was not thoroughly cooked. He promptly sent the entire set for another round in the oven, resulting in several being overbaked and dry. As it turns out, the oven had certain faults and oddities in its construction that caused some areas to not be heated enough, and the tray our unlucky friend chose was from one of these heatless spaces. Thankfully there was enough extra batter to meet the order, but the waste was still avoidable.
Now you may be asking, this and all is very good, Atharva, but I am neither a child nor a substitute baker. How exactly does this affect me in any way? Sure, if I somehow find myself in the situation where I have to make thousands of cupcakes in a faulty oven, I will keep this in mind, but is there is any other use for this?
Of course there is. Both of these tragic tales have one thing in common: they mistakenly relate the properties of the part with the property of the whole. When combined together, things change. While this may seem like an obvious and even trivial fact, it is actually not that intuitive, and has been one of the contributing factors to several major problems the world faces today.
One very real and grave example of this error can be found in anti-vax circles. One of the many reasons they give for not taking vaccines is the inclusion of thiomersal, a mercury compound added to certain injections as a preservative. It has gotten such hype that it has been removed from almost all routine doses, yet the fear still remains. Their claim was that mercury was toxic; ergo, thiomersal was toxic as well. One of the best rebuttals I have ever read was (paraphrasing since I can’t locate the original), ‘There is an element that violently explodes when it comes in contact with water. Another element is highly deadly and attacks the respiratory system, eyes, and skin, causing chemical burns. Would you eat a compound of the two?’ Of course, this was merely table salt, as a bewildered anti-vaxxer learned that day.
Racism and most other forms of bigotry are also caused in part by this. Let’s go back to the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which caused an unprecedented wave of Islamophobia across the world. If one were to think about it logically, it makes no sense: only the extremist group who planned and executed the attack should be condemned, not all the adherents of the religion. But humans are not rational beings; our actions are swayed by anger and fear to our own detriment. In the case of 9/11, the prejudice and hate born out of it affected thousands more beyond who died in the actual tower collapse, with echoes clinging to us even now.
Formally, these mistakes are known as the fallacies of composition and division, aka part-to-whole and whole-to-part. Of the two, the first is important in economics, the second in statistics. The economy of a nation works very differently from the economy of a single household; similarly, information about the averages of a group doesn’t give much information about any particular individual in the group.
One good thing about these fallacies is that it is simple to avoid them once you are aware of them. They are trivially easy to spot in most cases, and with time and effort, can be removed from your thought process. If it feels too difficult, start small: rationalize simpler things and build your way up to the complicated ones. But it is vital that you do so, for they are not nearly as harmless as they might seem.
Since this whole article was well-written, perhaps the ending will be too?
Proofreaders: Mokshit N.
