Jeremy embedded this TED talk on his blog, and after watching it, I wanted to share it here. It's pretty brilliant. Enough so, that Jeremy labeled it "Required Watching", and it's hard for me to disagree. In the video, researcher Dan Gilbert makes some sharp points about how our minds work, why we make the decisions we do, and how to make better decisions in the future. It covers a lot of ground, from Bernoulli to Big Macs to Terrorism...
Anyhow, it's well worth watching. It's about 30 minutes long.
Around the 20th minute or so, there's a confusing bit about a Fireman and a Fiddler. Either the presenter mis-spoke, or there's technical issues with his visuals (and Dan Gilbert fails to notice or comment on the tech issues), or the optical illusion didn't work on us, or we're just dense - neither Sarah and I felt the visuals matched his point on the Fireman and the Fiddler. We nearly stopped watching at that moment, thinking we'd grokked his main point, so why go on... But I'm really glad we followed it through to the end. The weird part only lasts a minute or two, and the stuff that follows is really good again. Watch it, all of it, it's worth your time.
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The video provoked the following thoughts, which I thought were worth sharing, but didn't want in the body of the post where they would be just a distraction from the main topic of the video...
I've purchased two (maybe it was three?) lottery tickets in my life. Despite knowing the odds of winning were virtually non-existent, I got a 15-minute thrill both times I purchased them, and a 30-minute thrill on the night they aired the results, both times. (Again, maybe three times? Can't say for sure.)
I lost, of course. Both times. I knew that'd be the likely result, yet I held out hope. Both times. I felt silly as hell the next day, and so chose not to do it again.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a third time, yeah, now I must admit I really look and feel like an idiot. Fool me a fourth time - I just wasn't willing to go there.
That said, $1 for 45 minutes of excitement - that beats the value of most other forms of entertainment. A two-hour action film probably delivers 1.5 hours of excitement. The ticket costs $10, so that's 5 times the cost of an equal amount of entertainment in lottery tickets. What's more, a bad film can fail to deliver any excitement or entertainment... whereas a losing lottery ticket still gives the same "buzz" every time. (Or, so I assume. It's possible there are diminishing returns, which I just hadn't experienced yet in my 2 or 3 ticket purchases.)
In retrospect, when I was living in poor impoverished New Mexico, and people I knew were on lottery scholarships, it would have made sense for me to pay $52 a year in "Stupidity Tax."
At the time, though, I was a collectible D&D miniatures addict, which cost significantly more than a buck a week.
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