Let’s say you have a cold. It’s going to get better after a few days, but at the moment you feel miserable. It’s quite natural that when your symptoms are at their very worst, you will do things to try to get better. You might take a homeopathic remedy. You might sacrifice a goat and dangle its entrails around your neck. You might bully your GP into giving you antibiotics. (I’ve listed these in order of increasing ridiculousness.) Then, when you get better—as you surely will from a cold—you will naturally assume that whatever you did when your symptoms were at their worst must be the reason
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Regression to the mean.
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