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The Tragically Common Mistake Of Treating Disparate Events Equally
“A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality” *
I love taking baths. They always improve things: if we are stressed, they calm us down; if we are relaxed, they emphasise the feeling. Because they are rare occurrences in our world of environmental emergencies and busy schedules, I want them to be perfect. My eccentricity drove me to purchase this wonderful instrument designed to check the temperature of cooked meat. Dip it in the bathtub, and it tells you the water temperature. A quick online search indicated that 42 to 43 degrees Celsius (about 108 Fahrenheit) would be ideal. When I inserted the same device in the quiche cooking away in the oven (do not invert the order of the factors here), it showed the same temperature. Excellent: the perfect quiche would follow the perfect bath. Except, of course, dinner would be undercooked.
Ridiculous eccentricities and quotidian adventures aside, the mistake of judging two distinct circumstances by the same standards is alarmingly frequent. Often, it is not a mistake at all: nefarious media heads seek to confuse people by assessing exceedingly different events as though they were similar. If a politician is found keeping part of their wealth in a foreign bank account, thus avoiding high taxes, we…