When a coin is flipped, it rotates in air end-over-end several time and when it lands and comes to rest, we will be able to see the side which is facing up. In school, the probability and statistics problems while referring to flipping coin, they mention the usage of unbiased coin and of unbiased conditions. It’s because if anything is biased, calculating probability or of that matter, calculating anything else becomes difficult and also impossible in maths. In real life, probability of having unbiased situations is unpredictable. When the coin is flipped, there is also chance of coin landing vertically rather than landing on its sides viz. head or tail. Life is NOT Unbiased.
In engineering drawing, students are taught to draw the three views of an object viz top, bottom, side views. Only by merging all the views we can get a clear idea of the object. Likewise, in our day-to- day life, to get a complete all-round understanding of anything, we need to probe into it; find out the different facets of it.
I am reminded of a story where a group of visually-challenged children visit a zoo to learn about an elephant. They are let free to touch and feel the elephant in order to understand it. Later, when they are questioned, they all answer differently. The first child who had touched and felt the elephant’s legs says “Elephant is huge,tall cylinder”. The second child who had experienced the elephant’s tail answers “Elephant is a long rope”. Some other child from that group says “Elephant is a long tube”,having felt the elephant’s trunk. Neither of the children are completely wrong. Their answers were based on the assumptions they had formed by experiencing/probing only a single aspect of an elephant. If they had experienced and probed in all the possible aspects/facets regarding an elephant, they might have answered correctly.
A person can completely understand themselves only when probed in the following directions:
1. What do we think of ourselves?
2. What do others think of us?
3. What we are actually?
When the answers of the above questions are combined, we will get to know the ‘real us’.
In the story of visually-challenged children, the significance of ‘understanding the multiple facets/aspects’ is mentioned. Properly merging/combining the multiple facets/aspects is also necessary. If a car is viewed from its four sides viz front, back, right and left, the car appears to be resting on two tires. So, calculating the number of tires of car as follows: Number of tires of a car = Sum of the number of tires observed on all the sides = 4 sides * 2 tires on each side = 8 tires. If a play-school kid hears this answer, even they may laugh at it.
In this biased life we live, understanding multiple aspects is important and properly merging them is also equally important in order to get a clear picture of anything (fact/object/concept/living being…) in order to cope with them. Few facets/aspects might seem silly, but if ignored… they might make us look silly.
OS Musings 