Here’s a THREAD related to the pandemic

1. I stumbled on Sigmund Freud while writing a certain article about Nigeria & ever since, I’ve been intrigued by psychology.

I then read “The Undoing Project”, a story of the work of 2 psychologists who won the Nobel prize in ECONOMICS.

2. They spent a lot of time studying the reasons for the mistakes the human mind constantly makes!

One such mistake is “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” and another is confusing correlation with causality and this one, is the poignant one for this period.

3. The 1st pic is where this pandemic hit worst

The 2nd, the image of where malaria is rampant, looks like a mirror image of the 1st & you’ll see that it’s where there’s less impact of the pandemic

Common conclusion: malaria, or its treatment, causes a resistance. But does it?

4. I took the liberty to add 2 more maps which, “coincidentally” look exactly the same as the malaria map in the 2nd. The last 2 maps are the countries where heat & poverty are worst

Clearly there’s high correlation between avoiding the pandemic & malaria but is there causality?

5. If “yes” is your answer, will you also say there’s causality between avoiding the pandemic & poverty? The correlation is equally high

Without further investigation, especially with limited data (imagine I submitted just the first 2 diagrams) it may look entirely plausible

6. But once you understand, in advance, the errors common to the human mind, it then becomes like having a map to a minefield & you’ll avoid a lot of missteps.

Some mistakes humans make are easily predicted and therefore, avoidable if only we take time to understand them