A short spoken excerpt from a Niraj Naik YouTube video arguing that people are "brainwashed" by statistics and reductive averages (e.g., cholesterol, blood pressure). Naik claims averages misrepresent individual variation and that fear and suggestion—likened to "black magic" or voodoo—can create or worsen health problems.
Chapters
But here's the problem that we have in the world is people are brainwashed by statistics, okay? You need to understand how stats work, how you can cherry pick data to manipulate somebody's thought process and reductionist science, which is all about making an average for everyone and numbers. And this is your cholesterol, this is your blood pressure. This is your average reading. It's bullshit. We are not linear creatures. There is no average. Your average cholesterol is not going to be the same for me. And they might find that your cholesterol slightly higher than average, so they'll try and bring you down. But what's going on there is that, is that actually giving you more fear? It's like a form of black magic. It's what sorcerers and wizards used to do and voodoo people used to do.
By planting suggestions into people's minds, you almost create that problem in your body just by thinking it too much.