[qubex]

I have experienced this.

I consider myself a staunch rationalist and atheist.

But during a specific phase in my life, when I was dealing with something that was right on the knife-edge (almost exactly 50/50 odds, calculated analytically using financial mathematics), I became very superstitious about knocking over salt on the table. Whenever I went to a restaurant I’d ask to have the salt removed to avoid knocking it over.

I reasoned that I attached a low probability to the superstition about salt being true (yes, I know its origins: salt used to be extremely valuable so wasting it was prima facie ‘bad’) yet that low probability of it being true applied to the tiny margin I had available to me made it significant to me.

Yeah, stupid, I know.

[Siddharth_joshi]

Indeed, you’re correct. Often a constant trade-off of weightage is observed while analyzing a situation through facts-superstitions.