No. It’s called indulging ones personal and cognitive biases instead of recognizing them and not placing too much weight in them.
It makes facing each day less mentally taxing though to think ‘oh that’s just a statistic, it won’t happen to me because XYZ [read: I’m much more special-er than others in those statistics].
It’s human nature and I’m not denying that we all do it. At the end of the day everyone makes decisions emotionally and then rationalize them.
That is very true and I have seen lots of people rationalize their own behaviors for years. This is not specifically what I'm speaking of though and maybe that's for the miscommunication occurred or maybe you just don't believe it can happen differently.
It is human nature to rationalize one's own behavior to a point.
I am not saying knowing statistics because you think you're special and you just don't think it will happen to you. Tons of people do that every day when they throw caution to the wind about safety even things like not wearing a seatbelt for a quick trip only a mile or two from home.
I mean when you have empirical evidence even though it is only a much smaller subset of the group that others have empirical evidence on and almost the entirety.
If you have evidence that your personal numbers don't match the numbers that are of the whole group then without further research there's little way you can determine why this is.
I could give a fairly decent example with brake lines rusting out. There were some post about this recently but it's not a specific to this form as is one of my other forms which is more Town Car specific. Our trucks don't use stainless but the Town Cars started using stainless in 1998.
We could probably find out the overall lifespan of brake lines for a certain model or model period of vehicles.
This whole group has to take into consideration cars in warm climates that never see salt and also the worst Rust Belt states.
People are often told to stay away from 1990 to 1997 Town Cars because you will end up replacing brake lines. This is touted as fact.
The fact is the brake lines on those years is much shorter lived than the newer cars but for someone not to consider their own specific conditions could be doing them a disservice. They might not by a great 1995 or 97 at a great price for fear of having the added expense later of replacing all the brake lines which gets quite expensive if you're paying a shop to do it.
Someone who lives and many of the good States and keeps theirs in a garage will almost certainly get double the lifespan of the typical published factual results.
This is not hoping it won't happen because you're special. This is knowing that your conditions are different than other peoples. This is knowing if you've had a large amount of experience with the same types of engines and you haven't had the issues that other people do obviously you are doing something differently.
I think these can be two different things. It's not always cognitive bias. Sometimes it's just cognitive observation.
This is what I have meant from the beginning.
Maybe someone has found the super duper bypass toilet paper roll oil filter and uses Anlmsoils one thousand percent pure golden sapphire oil and they figured it all out. Maybe they never change their oil and get 300,000 miles of every engine they've had and they're on their 34th engine doing this.
I highly doubt this could ever occur but this person has no reason to believe that their 35th engine won't have similar results despite what any other statistics show.
I don't think it's cognitive or personal bias when you have a good deal of previous results to base it on.
I think I realize that what you're basing your comments on is that few people have enough experience or a sampled group to be able to form valid opinions that aren't simply cognitive bias. So they would be better served to listen to the published statistics.
For the majority of the population, you would be correct.
I'm just pointing out that there are people out there that have run fleets of vehicles that have had results that differ sometimes greatly from the norm.
