Over the weekend, I found myself with a small block of free time with absolutely no agenda. This luxury usually doesn't happen very often. On most days, I might just plop down in front of the television or a computer screen and while away the time. Today, I decided to do some deferred maintenance on our home.
Leading up to our front door is a stone walkway. My own version doesn't look like this photo below, but it gives you an idea. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, C.G. P. Grey)
Between the stones is fill made of stone chip. Every year, weed seeds float into the area and germinate. I often get too lazy to do much of anything about it. Unfortunately, it really does look terrible. Since I had the time, I forced myself to address it. Here were the main enemies: (Photo: www.better-lawn-care.com)
About fifteen minutes into the exercise, I started to regret it. After all, the sun was streaming down and it was a humid 90+°. Sweat started dripping into the area I was weeding. My fingers actually started to turn black from a mixture of weed sap, sand, and stone dust. After a bit more than an hour, I was done.
It was certainly gratifying to look at the path after I was done. I felt as if my sacrifice had certainly made my world better in some small way.
I am sure that there are many areas at work that have languished because we've been so caught up in the day to day. The next time you find an odd block of free time at your disposal, I hope that you can also work on similar chores for yourself!
This morning, I found two gray hairs. There is an odd symmetry--one on each temple just above the ear. Nestled among their jet black neighbors, they certainly stand out prominently when you are looking for them.
While there are many ways to look at it, I suppose I should consider myself lucky. I've generally been able to avoid this for most of my life. Now that I am advancing in years, this is usually the inevitable result.
It's always amusing when you are watching others go to comical lengths to deny or delay the inevitable. It's not so funny when you see it in the mirror yourself.
Oddly enough, I almost feel resigned to my fate. There is no sense in getting upset over it. I could just pluck them out if they bothered me that much. I thought about it as I looked in the mirror this morning after my shower, but decided against it.
Lately, I've been reminded more and more of the slow erosion of my current state of being. As I wander down the hallways at work, the faces around me grow slightly more hazy until they are almost up on top of me. It seems like my sight is narrowing and closing in ever more tightly. I suppose the hair is just another gentle reminder that nothing is permanent.
I'm really glad that I'll get the chance to play ball with my son later today. It will help remind me of better days and the overall joy in being alive.
Yesterday, a major storm system swept through the Northeast. It delivered over 30" of snow to some parts of Massachusetts. My town ended up with over two feet. The Mansfield office is still closed today to clean up.
Despite the wreckage in our area, there are still cries of fury. Most of them are coming from the New York area. In an unprecedented move, the governor shut down the subway (for the first time ever) and banned road travel. There were original predictions of two to three feet in NYC. They ended up with only about a foot of snow. That level is a nuisance, but should not have crippled the city.
Part of the challenge is that weather forecasting is still an inexact science. Weather fronts do not always move in straight lines. While our technology has improved dramatically, we still don't understand all of the variables that go into weather on a moment-by-moment basis. Air pressure near the ground can be very different at 100 feet up and dramatically different at 10,000 feet. All of this compexity means that it isn't humanly possible to make perfect predictions. It turns out that the forecasters were right--they just missed the target slightly. The storm passed fifty miles east of New York and hammered Long Island and New England.
Since NYC is such a major media market, I fully expect this mini-controversy to fill lots of air time on the 24 hour news circuit. There will be fingers wagging and heads shaking--particularly the next time another great storm heads towards that metropolitan area. Still, I am glad that we are taking precautions even if the events fizzle out. I have never personally been stranded on an icy roadside miles from home in impassable traffic. I hope I never have to experience that tragedy.
Would you trust a robot to pick out a wine for you?
If you did and it picked out a bottle that you didn't like, would you give it a second chance?
As technology is inserted into new areas of our lives, we will have to trust more and more decisionmaking power to fancy algorithms. Are we ready for the loss of control?
A recent study showed that it isn't quite as simple as placing blind faith in our computer overlords:
In a paper called “Algorithm Aversion: People Erroneously Avoid Algorithms After Seeing Them Err,” forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the University of Pennsylvania researchers Berkeley J. Dietvorst, Joseph P. Simmons, and Cade Massey asked subjects to consider the challenge of making a difficult forecast: predicting either MBA students’ academic success or states’ airline traffic. They could choose to tie what they earned to either the prediction accuracy of a human (usually themselves) or that of a statistical model. Before making their decision, they first saw the model’s performance on several trial runs, or saw the human’s performance, or both, or neither.
When they had not seen the statistical model perform on the trial runs, the majority of subjects bet on the model being more accurate in the money-earning round—they chose to tie their earnings to its performance rather than the human’s. But if they had seen it perform, the majority bet on the human. That’s despite the fact that the model outperformed the humans in every comparison, by margins ranging from 13 to 97 percent. Even when people saw the performance of both the model and the human in the trial runs, and saw that the model did better, they still tended to tie their winnings in the earnings round to the human over the model. They were more accepting of the human’s mistakes.
These findings surprised the researchers. They had expected people to shy from algorithms at first and then change their minds after seeing their superior performance, Dietvorst says. Instead, he says, they “found completely the opposite.”
One of the study authors speculates that people are less likely to trust computers when it touches on their health or their ego. We may feel that human judgment can provide superior advice by weighing variables no computer can possibly comprehend. That belief may not actually be supported by the data:
There can be a real cost to this aversion. A 2000 meta-analysis summarized 136 studies comparing predictions made by experts with those made by equations, in areas including medical prognosis, academic performance, business success, and criminal behavior. Mechanical predictions beat clinical predictions about half the time, while humans outperformed equations in only 6 percent of cases. Those are judgments with significant implications for our lives, and it’s a genuine loss to ignore a system that can give us much more accurate answers.
A possible solution might be trying to incorporate some user feedback to help return a level of control to the user:
The researchers at Penn are now exploring why people abandon algorithms so quickly. There may be a hint in the fact that subjects judged the statistical model as worse than humans at learning from mistakes and getting better with practice. Perhaps people could learn to trust algorithms more if they were told that computers can learn. Balfoort says that once you inform customers that WineStein gets better with feedback, “you get a satisfied nod.”
In current work, Dietvorst is finding that giving people the chance to alter an algorithm’s forecast even a trivial amount increases their adoption of it over a human counterpart, from less than 50 percent to more than 70 percent. People “don’t want to completely surrender control,” he says. Ironically, the user’s adjustment usually makes the computer forecast slightly worse, but at least it gets them to use it.
Life offers all kinds of unexpected intersections. They often are hidden in plain sight while we go about our daily routines.
Yesterday, our family went ice skating for the first time. While my wife and I had been on skates before, it had been many years ago. Our boys had never actually been on the ice, so we expected a number of falls along the way.
We were there for roughly two hours. It was a bright, sunny day and we were trying to make the most of it. With a winter storm fast approaching (and expected to dump two feet or more of snow on us tomorrow), it might end up being the last outdoor activity for some time.
In order to propel you along the surface, the ice skate actually makes tiny cuts that enable a thin layer of water. This action allows the skater to glide along. It also leaves behind fine ice shavings that eventually accumulate into larger chunks.
Over the course of time, these chunks will continue to build and make it increasingly difficult to sustain your travel. It gets harder and harder to skate because your skate can't slice as effectively for those long, elegant strokes.
About 2/3 of the way into our session, management cleared the ice for the Zamboni. If you have never seen this machine in action, it is actually fascinating to watch. It will scrape off the assorted chop on the top of the ice and spray a fresh, thin layer of water. The water will eventually freeze and form a fresh, glassy surface.
When they let us back out on the ice about ten minutes later, you could notice the difference immediately. It took much less effort to skate. Each step propelled you into an instant glide. I took a few quick spins around the oval. At one point, I carried a little too much speed and my feet went out from under me. I landed with a thud on my right hip. It hurt much more than I expected. Ice, after all, is a fairly unforgiving surface. Luckily, I sustained no more than a slight bruising to both my backside and my ego.
I only fell once; I can only imagine how my boys felt (they were both soaking wet from being covered in ice shavings that eventually melted). Fortunately for us, they never complained. It seems youth does cushion the blow and speed recovery time.
In this first week ahead with our new adventure, I sat back and recognized a number of parallels to our current situation.
Here's wishing you smooth skating with no falls along the way!
We've all done it. We watch a situation unfold and immediately begin criticizing the execution. If only the participants had done this or that, then the outcome would have been incredibly different. We're so sure that we have the answers for others.
The real challenge begins when others apply the same lens to us. Suddenly, we're not so sure that they understand all of the intangibles that went into the decision. If only those armchair judges could sit in our shoes then they would understand all of the complex reasoning that went into our different handling of the situation.
It's so easy to pick out the faults in others. It's really difficult to use the same harsh grading scale on ourselves.
Over the weekend, I spent some time with extended family members. When you are dealing with people you may only see once or twice a year, you don't get a true picture. You only get snapshots and glances that must be extrapolated into a fuller picture. The classic example is the relative's story of meeting a rock star as part of a TV audience. Because they didn't personally greet each and everyone and only gave out a crappy participation gift, this star went from a classy human being to a shady cheapskate. Unfair? Perhaps, but it's what happened.
At this particular event, we had a smaller session with a subset of the family analyzing how we could solve the issues. The loudest voice came from an older relative who calmly explained exactly what should have been done to resolve this really tricky dispute between two other family members. If they would only bring their disagreements out in the open, then they would be able to come to an amicable resolution! True, but getting to that point would be near impossible since the pair weren't speaking to each other at the moment. What made it even more ironic was that this particular relative had a similar dispute with another family member that went for years and was never resolved because they did not speak to each other!
Since it is still January, I resolve to try to use the same judgment on myself that I would first apply to others. I may not always succeed, but I will try to remind myself to tone down the criticism wherever possible.
"The Gambler" by Kenny Rogers is a famous song that discusses a simplified strategy of poker. The rules of the game are fairly straightforward. All players are trying to create the best possible hand as determined by the rules of the game being played. With 52 cards, there are staggering numbers of potential variations that change with every hand.
In an effort to stretch their limits, computer programmers have "solved" many games. Ars Technica explains this phenomenon further:
Computers have made remarkable progress when it comes to beating their programmers at a number of games. Checkers, Chess, and Jeopardy have all seen their champions fall to silicon opponents. In fact, for two games—checkers and Connect Four—computers have calculated the optimal move for every single possible board combination. The best a human can hope for is a draw.
But the games computers have done well with are what are called "perfect information games," where both players have full access to all the knowledge there is to have about the game. (Think of it this way: by looking at a chess board, you know precisely where every piece on the board is.) Lots of games that attract players have imperfect information: players know things their opponents don't. The classic examples here are card games, where some fraction of the cards is typically known only to the player holding them.
It's not possible to solve these in the same sense; you can't know the ideal path forward from a given state because you simply don't fully know what the state is. But it is possible to figure out strategies that make it very difficult for an opponent to exploit them. And, for a specific form of poker, researchers have now done so. Given a set of strategies, no human is likely to come out ahead while playing a computer.
There have been a number of triumphant headlines declaring that computers can now defeat humans at poker. The programming effort was intensive and impressive:
This creates a serious computation challenge, as heads-up limit Texas hold’em needs 3.19 x 1014 individual pieces of data to store the combination of strategies and regret values. The authors estimate that alone would take up over 260TB of disk space. To cut this down, the authors multiplied all of these floating point values by a scaling factor (to make them larger numbers) and then converted them to integers. They then devised a storage scheme that kept these values stored in a manner that's easily compressed. In the end, this cut things down to 17TB of storage.
The program then has to iterate through all possible strategies and assign them regret values. To speed the process of identifying winning approaches, any strategy that had never been chosen before but resulted in a win was immediately tried again. Beyond that, strategies are chosen with a probability proportional to their regret values. The authors also simplified computations by dividing up the huge number of possibilities into a bit over 100,000 subgames based on things like the initial bets and the flop (first face-up cards).
Even with all these optimizations, it took a cluster of 200 2.1GHz AMD cores (each with 32GB of RAM) 900 core-years to reach a point where improvements in outcomes slowed down. At that point, the strategies were optimized such that a person could play it for 70 years, 12 hours a day, using its own optimized strategy, and it would be overwhelmingly unlikely for them to end up ahead by a statistically significant margin. The authors call this situation "weakly solved."
While this is an amazing achievement, it also points out how staggeringly complex card games involving imperfect information can be. The version of poker that the computer "weakly solved" only involves two players at a time in the simplest form of Texas Hold-'Em where bets are limited with each hand. The type of poker typically shown on TV actually involves up to nine players at a time with unlimited bets on every round. This adds multiple layers of complexity which would be well beyond the current program's capabilities.
The Economist wrote another article that sums this up best:
Whether computers will ever be able to solve other forms of poker remains doubtful. Merely removing the betting restrictions on HULHE, for instance, boosts the range of possibilities to 6.38x10161, a figure so mind-bogglingly big that it far exceeds the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. No amount of improvement in computer hardware will ever make such a problem tractable. The only hope is an enormous, and unlikely, conceptual breakthrough in how to attack the question.
There are, of course, poker-playing programs out there already that play more complicated versions of the game than HULHE. The best are better than most humans. But they, like chess-playing programs, do not actually solve the game in a mathematically rigorous sense. They just process more data that a human brain can cope with, and thus arrive at a better answer than most such brains can manage.
The most interesting computational solution to poker, though, would be one that did work more like a human brain, for instance by looking for the famous “tells” that experienced players claim give away their opponent’s state of mind, or even bluffing those opponents about its own intentions. When computers can do that, mere humans—and not just poker players—should really start worrying.
We constantly focus on the future. We talk endlessly about innovation and recreation and building new business models. In all that discussion, we may sometimes overlook the long transition period to the new order. We may also miss the fact that the status quo will also have powerful champions and may survive well past what one might have thought initially.
Take a look at PCs. The first signs of weakness in their industry came as laptops started to rise. After laptops came netbooks. Still later, tablets were all the rage. Despite all of the massive change in the industry, PCs have survived in new forms.
This post by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times covers this very point. He references something Steve Jobs once said to him in an interview:
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Mr. Jobs said. But as farming died off and people in urban areas began to buy automobiles, the auto market split into distinct categories. There were easy to use, relatively maintenance-free cars for everyday drivers, and powerful, specialty vehicles like trucks for people who needed to get stuff done. Laptops and desktops “are going to be like trucks,” Mr. Jobs predicted. “They’re still going to be around. They’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of x people.”
The rest of the article is a discussion of the new Apple iMac Retina 5K. As the new world continues to evolve, it will be important for us to remember that there is still a great deal of benefit in servicing the old one....
For most of us, the holidays are a time of (over)indulgence. Our family recently took a tour where we witnessed a demonstration of hearth cooking. This was done over a massive open fireplace in the house in the same way it would have been done about 150 years ago. The docent explained that in the Northern hemisphere, the end of the year was a time of feasting to celebrate the harvest and prepare for the tough winter and spring months until you could harvest again in the summer. From those ancient rituals sprang holidays like Christmas and New Year. I had never really thought of it that way.
To counteract the holidays, many of us will start to watch what we eat. An important part of controlling our diets is to understand portion sizes and calorie counts. The New York Times recently put together a photo essay documenting servings at some popular American restaurants to show readers what 2,000 calories (approximately what a normal adult should be eating over an entire day) might look like. As you can imagine, there were single items that could sometimes exceed that limit! (Cheesecake Factory had a dish called Louisiana Chicken Pasta weighing in at 2,370 calories while Sonic had a Peanut Butter Caramel Pie Shake measured at 2,090).
Let's start a select tour:
One common chain, Subway, offers a relative feast for 2,000 calories:
A few years ago when the iPhone was just starting out, there used to be a marketing tag line that went "there's an app for that." Now that there are literally hundreds of thousands of different apps, there really does seem to be an application for just about anything that you can imagine. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to link these various apps together.
One of the reasons search engines have been so successful is that they take the chaos that is the world wide web and help to simplify and organize it into digestible chunks. You don't have to be an expert about every topic under the sun. By crawling the web, sites like Google and Bing do the heavy lifting for you to return relevant search results. There is no such entity linking apps together. At this point, there are all kinds of data and information inputs in all of these apps, but nothing linking them together.
Navigating the Internet used to mean painstakingly typing the exact address you wanted into your computer. The web browser and the search engine simplified that, giving us the Internet we take for granted today.
Now, across Silicon Valley, companies from tiny start-ups to titans like Google and Facebook are trying to bring the same simplicity to smartphones by teaching apps to talk to one another.
Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them.
It is not just a matter of consumer convenience. For Google and Facebook, and any company that has built its business on the web, it is a matter of controlling the next entryway to the Internet — the mobile device.
The major companies are hard at work on the problem:
Take Google, which makes money helping people search the web. When people search in apps, it is mostly left out. And while the company has a fast-growing business selling apps through devices that use its Android operating system, that pales in comparison to its business selling search advertising.
Google’s solution is App Indexing technology, a way to catalog app pages, letting Google’s search engine retrieve information from mobile applications as well as from web pages.
Still, there are major challenges:
With so many companies and investors working on deep linking, the competition has become a problem. That is because the easiest way to get apps to link as if they were part of the web is to get app developers to adopt one standard that would work across devices and operating systems.
“Once we’re all using the same plumbing, everyone can go and build businesses and interesting experiences on top of that,” said Eddie O’Neil, a Facebook product manager working on the company’s program, App Links.
The app problem traces its origins to 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store for iPhones. Unlike websites, apps were set up to be separate little boxes whose technology prohibited them from interacting with one another. At the time, the idea of a phone full of apps was new enough that most people were not very worried about whether those apps could link to each other. But today, apps have begun to eclipse the web. Americans spend about half of their time online using mobile apps, according to comScore, a digital media analytics company.
It will be fascinating to watch as our mobile world morphs and changes over the coming years.
It seems that no one listens to voice mail anymore.
I think it started with the texting revolution. All at once, there was a communication vehicle that was immediate and demanded your attention. With the advent of ubiquitous cellphones, we now expect the person we are trying to reach to pick up immediately.
This article from Quartz gives further evidence of the decline of voice mail:
Many young people will agree that voicemail—once essential in business and personal communications—has in just a few years become basically irrelevant and actually quite annoying. So Coca-Cola’s November memo announcing that it would disconnect landline voicemails at its headquarters comes as a vindication for those trying to convince the last holdouts among families, friends, and colleagues that voicemail is an exceedingly bad way to get in touch.
The company is specifically getting rid of old-school voicemail lines, the ones where you have to listen or skip through previous messages to get to the latest. The cost savings from the move aren’t huge—less than $100,000, according to Coke—but there’s an efficiency benefit. Usage was declining, and the company wanted increase productivity. (Meanwhile, Coke will cut 1,000 to 2,000 jobs globally after Christmas, the Wall Street Journal reports.(paywall))
The new standard outgoing message asks the caller to try again later or use an “alternative method” to get in touch. People who had a critical need for voicemail were given the option to keep it, but a mere 6% of employees did, according to Bloomberg.
Voicemail is among the least efficient ways to get in touch with somebody in the age of with smartphones, email push notifications, and texting. A backlog of accumulated voicemail now feels like a daunting task to work through. And it’s often assumed that if the message is truly important, the person will call back or email. Office-based systems in particular require jumping through hoops, passwords, registration and so on, steps that busy people try to avoid.
Part of the problem with voicemail is its format: Conventional voicemail etiquette seem almost designed to stretch out a conversation and omit important information. First there’s a greeting; then the description of who’s calling and of when exactly the call was made (despite that information being provided in the playback and probably the phone’s screen too); followed by a long-winded description of whatever prompted the call; only to end with a request for a call back, often with little context for why.
There are still times when a phone call is the best way to communicate. But if a person doesn’t pick up her phone, it’s probably for a reason that would also prevent her checking voicemail—a meeting, perhaps. But chances are, she has probably mastered the art of the under-the-table text message.
Over the holidays, I was reading an article on sports analytics. While it may seem as if the use of statistics to improve the performance of sports teams has no bearing whatsoever on the production of medical devices, I would challenge you to think about this excerpt:
At the end of the day, it boils down to this. The information is only as good as it is to the person receiving it. I’ll take a C+ piece of analysis communicated perfectly over an A+ piece of analysis that’s not communicated well. Only a small portion of the work is the analytics itself. The rest is putting it in a practical format so the salary-cap person and the coach can appreciate it and use it. Instead of trying to go overboard with analytics, focus on the practical: Focus on the things that have the highest impact on your organization.
This one paragraph really highlights my own personal goal for 2015. I'll be searching for those few great pieces of analysis and insight that can truly impact our organization. I will then challenge myself to communicate it as perfectly as humanly possible.
A recent article in the Atlantic discusses a research paper in behavioral economics that came up with a recommendation for leading a happier life. According to their findings, we would be happier if we would buy experiences instead of material goods. One of the authors of the paper, Matthew Killingsworth, writes that "happiness is in the content of moment-to-moment experiences".
Over the past decade, an abundance of psychology research has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than do possessions. The idea that experiential purchases are more satisfying than material purchases has long been the domain of Cornell psychology professor Thomas Gilovich. Since 2003, he has been trying to figure out exactly how and why experiential purchases are so much better than material purchases. In the journal Psychological Science last month, Gilovich and Killingsworth, along with Cornell doctoral candidate Amit Kumar, expanded on the current understanding that spending money on experiences "provide[s] more enduring happiness." They looked specifically at anticipation as a driver of that happiness; whether the benefit of spending money on an experience accrues before the purchase has been made, in addition to after. And, yes, it does.
Essentially, when you can't live in a moment, they say, it's best to live in anticipation of an experience. Experiential purchases like trips, concerts, movies, et cetera, tend to trump material purchases because the utility of buying anything really starts accruing before you buy it.
Their research seems to point to an explanation for this phenomenon:
Gilovich's prior work has shown that experiences tend to make people happier because they are less likely to measure the value of their experiences by comparing them to those of others. For example, Gilbert and company note in their new paper, many people are unsure if they would rather have a high salary that is lower than that of their peers, or a lower salary that is higher than that of their peers. With an experiential good like vacation, that dilemma doesn't hold. Would you rather have two weeks of vacation when your peers only get one? Or four weeks when your peers get eight? People choose four weeks with little hesitation.
What is it about the nature of imagining experiential purchases that's different from thinking about future material purchases? The most interesting hypothesis is that you can imagine all sort of possibilities for what an experience is going to be. "That's what's fun," Kumar said. "It could turn out a whole host of ways." With a material possession, you kind of know what you're going to get. Instead of whetting your appetite by imagining various outcomes, Kumar put it, people sort of think, Just give it to me now.
It could turn out that to get the maximum utility out of an experiential purchase, it's really best to plan far in advance. Savoring future consumption for days, weeks, years only makes the experience more valuable. It definitely trumps impulse buying, where that anticipation is completely squandered. (Never impulse-buy anything ever.)
Every holiday season, there are all kinds of gift exchanges. It's a running theme that many of them will be ill-suited for the recipient. Whether it is well-intentioned thoughts that went awry (think of the ugly sweater syndrome) or people buying gifts that they would like instead of what the receiver would lke, there is a reason why the malls are jammed after Christmas with returns. In a perfect economic world, you would not waste all of that time giving gifts that the recipients don't want so that they are either wasted or exchanged.
It does seem to be a bit too much like Scrooge to admit what this professor prints in his academic paper:
"I find that holiday gift giving destroys between one-third and one-tenth of the value of gifts,” proclaimed Joel Waldfogel, then an economics professor at Yale, in the 1993 paper. He estimated that ill-chosen gifts caused between $4 billion and $13 billion a year in economic waste; for comparison, he cited an estimate that put economic costs of the income tax at $50 billion.
This is the sort of provocation economists love: It rejects a beloved, sentimental tradition and devalues interpersonal interaction, while upholding the virtue of individual choice. After all, why should you shop for me, when I certainly know what I want better than you do? It’s no surprise that Mr. Waldfogel’s paper, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” was published in The American Economic Review, one of the world’s top three economics journals.
Despite the fact that this may be true, I still like the fact that Josh Barro goes on to evaluate a gift he got from his father (an economist):
On the other hand, let’s evaluate the box of fancy chocolates he and Rachel sent me for Christmas this year.
There are three ways to evaluate this gift. The first level of analysis is that I’m on a diet and certainly would not have bought the chocolate myself, which suggests this was an example of what Mr. Waldfogel warned us about: gift mismatch leading to deadweight loss.
The second level of analysis is that I’ve already eaten half the box, which demonstrates my revealed preference for chocolate, and shows my father achieved exactly what he set out to do: He identified an item I would not have bought for myself but apparently wanted.
The third level of analysis considers the fact that I now feel I should not have eaten the chocolates, or at least not so many of them in two days. Behavioral economists call this phenomenon “hyperbolic discounting”: we overrate the value of immediate pleasures compared to delayed ones, and may do things today (like eat half a box of truffles) that we would have said yesterday we wouldn’t do and will say tomorrow that we should not have done.
My father, who is not a behavioral economist, would surely reject this last analysis and say if I ate the chocolates, that must have been the rational thing for me to do; therefore, the chocolates were a great gift.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons, C.G. P. Grey)
(Photo: www.better-lawn-care.com)
