No birth control method is cent per cent guaranteed. Just like everything else probabilities are at play here with maybe the best method having a .95 percent chance of successes. That means 5 babies every 100 times you have sex using that method. No I am just scaring you. It means out of 100 women who use the best birth control and have sex today 5 will get pregnant.*
So what do you do when there is no certain way to completely rule out an improbable but damaging event. In many ways conceiving a baby is very similar to experiencing an earthquake. It is improbable that you will conceive a baby with your birth control or experience an earthquake but you have to ensure yourself against the worst case scenario. Just hoping that it hasn’t happened yet so it wont happen any time in future is foolish. Similarly foolish is the notion that it doesn’t happen to people like me.
What engineers do is they have a margin of safety to make the bridge resilient to earthquakes. They call it redundancy or back up. . Like you make a bridge considerably stronger than the maximum stress it may face in a worse scenario ( or what you think is a worse case scenario ) or in protecting your data you have multiple data back ups at multiple locations.
A lot of value investors (a particular philosophy of investing) have often said that the three most important words in investing as far as they are concerned are -margin of safety. Value investing is a simple idea that you buy a stock if it is selling for much cheaper than what the company is worth (an idea that would click with most Indians I suppose ) but it is not so easy to know what a company is precisely worth. It is relatively much easier to know that the company is worth much more than what it’s selling at. Like it may not be easy to tell how much does your girlfriend weighs exactly, but you can tell she is fat. And margin of safety implies that you ensure that you buy only when the gap between price and value is too much.
And a way to increase your margin of safety is to look for redundancy or back up.For example you better make sure that the management has a long record of being ethical before you buy non voting shares which you believe are selling at discount. Ethical record of the management is an extra back up or cushion that makes your investment safer. There is no guarantee of anything.
So probably you can combine two – three methods wisely to do- oh you know what I mean – this blog post has been extremely embarrassing to write but we are here to do all sorts of social service.
* the birth control statistics are purely conjectural
- Amaresh
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