SEPTEMBER 10 — "You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.” — Nicholas Taleb

I have a relative who, if forced to make an unexpected stop while on the road, will immediately turn on his car’s emergency signal.

I know of a father who, whenever his daughter wants to go out with her friends, will get her to list down the names and contact numbers of all the pals she’ll be out gallivanting with.

An uncle I have has this habit of always closing the bathroom window each time it rains while he’s taking a shower, for fear of a lightning strike.

Another aunt always keeps a minimum of US$400 (RM1,660) in her wallet each time she goes abroad.

An ex-boss of mine never accepts free gifts from third-party "big shots” above a certain amount.

An ex-teacher never does anything irreversible within 24 hours whenever she’s angry.

A grand-uncle refuses to perform banking transactions online.

Another friend refuses to eat raw seafood.

And the list goes on.

The above are examples I can think of which fit the category of "constructive paranoia.” This is a term coined by anthropologist Jared Diamond.

On one of his many trips to New Guinea, he noticed that the local guides refused to sleep under a tree if it was dead. At first Diamond felt that their behaviour verged on over-reaction but then it occurred to him that a) every day he could hear trees falling somewhere in the forest and b) given how often the New Guineans slept under trees, it was entirely rational to avoid sleeping under a dead tree because one never knows when it would fall (see Note 1).

The bottomline is that such "paranoia” is essential for surviving in certain conditions. If the New Guinean had listened to smart-ass "scientific” folks overly full of their Probability Studies telling them "not to worry”, these orang asli would be dead eventually and the academics will, as usual, be finding excuses as to why they’re still correct.

Risk expert Nick Taleb (see Note 2) latched on to Diamond’s concept and explained that we must never discount any kind of behaviour ─ no matter how "irrational” or "superstitious” they may seem ─ if such behaviour facilitated survival.

We moderns, with our know-it-all mentality, often think we’re smarter than traditional folks who, as the Chinese say, have eaten more salt than we’ve eaten rice.

But for Taleb, Diamond and the New Guineans, rationality equals survival. Period. It doesn’t matter how smart or rich or connected you are.

If you ruin yourself i.e. if you get into a high-impact irreversible shit-storm as a result of actions you could’ve avoided, it’s probably because you took actions you believed were rational but were really the opposite.

Consider these examples: