Author: MIKE

One of our Quarantine Challenge items was to play every game we own at least once. Starting near the top of the this-will-take-a-while pile was Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit.

It’s typical for my wife and daughters to gang up on me. Mostly because I like the games so much, but in HPTP it’s them who have an advantage. Never-the-less, they pick on me and use a classic psychological study finding to do it. 

There’s a riddle that goes like this, a “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

Most people answer that the ball costs ten cents. People are thinking fast and thinking wrong. 

However, when the riddle is printed in a small or 𝔬𝒹𝚍 font most people answer correctly. When the riddle uses automotive brands, rather than a bat and ball, most people answer correctly. What gives? 

“A bat and ball…” leads most people to quick thinking that serves us well in many parts of our life but doesn’t do so well when we need to think slow. In HPTP this manifests in the way a person can ask the question. When my wife asked, “Which horcrux does Harry destroy first?” she emphasized the word “first.” She verbally bolded word. My twelve-year-old daughter slowed down and gave the right answer. 

The girls do this all the time.

But I have a few tricks too.

One that I use a lot is Gigerenzer’s recognition heuristic. Usually the first answer that comes to mind is the right one. But not always (see Austin or Fort Worth?)

I asked my wife, “In the first film, the library scenes were filmed at one of which famous English university’s library?” 

I only know two, Oxford and Cambridge. She only knows one, ‘Where the prince went’. Using the recognition heuristic, I’d have gotten it correct. 

HPTP is in the perfect zone of don’t-quite-know. For some answers I’m better off slowing down. For some answers I’m better off following recognition.

*“Late-night hosts are like parents. Their job is to tuck us into bed at night, make us smile, sooth us. What I do is different. I’m not going to put you to sleep. I’m going to blast you awake. There’s a reason we drink coffee in the morning and not at night. I’m not warm milk. I’m caffeinated. I’m going to tell you everything is not all right. I’m not all right. You’re not all right. The world is not all right. What I do is too hot for television. I mean ‘hot’ in the way that Marshall McLuhan used the word.” – Howard Stern in Howard Stern Comes Again*

On Saturday night I drove past restaurants with outdoor seating and it was packed. Many people celebrated St. Patrick’s Day weekend, though maybe fewer than normal because parking was a bit easier to come by. 

In addition to the medical confusion and bottlenecks with CoVid19 are the psychological dissonance and hindrances. Some people preach and participate for self-quarantine to slow the spread. Some cite flu statistics killing such-and-such multiple more people each year. Like any situation, when we ‘don’t get it’ we get to ‘ask why?’ 

One theory is that crises, like content mediums, run hot and cold. War went from warm to hot with the introduction of television in Vietnam. It’s probably gone cold again with drones. Sports commentary went from cold to hot in the transformation away from writers and toward talking heads. It’s probably cooled a bit with podcasts.

Like tree, bush, and grass growth in a forest, each change from cold to warm too hot and back again is endogenous to the systems. It’s not that talking-heads are good but that talking heads are good for TV.

Central Florida provides a nice contrast between the cool crisis of CoVid19 with the warm crisis of hurricane preparation. With the former it doesn’t feel like self quarantine is ‘doing anything’ whereas hurricans have a flury of preparation. We even have a Disaster Preparedness Sales Tax Holiday. Hurricane damage everyone can see. Hurricane damage can be quoted in dollars.

None of these things are true for CoVid19.

What else runs hot and cold?

• Saving is cold, spending is hot. 
• Policy is cold, politics is hot. 
• Research is cold, takes are hot

A friend reached out for help writing a note to their clients about what was happening, why it mattered, and what they could do. In effect, they wanted to know how to communicate cool things cool, hot things hot, or move people from one to another. Most personal wealth should be cool. Most personal health should be warm. 

This might all come back to McLuhan. People are relative thinkers, and after being blasted with a lot of hot (air) news we’re not sensitivite to change. It reminds of me my first pizza after my first Whole 30. It was sweet. I didn’t know pizza was sweet. I couldn’t know until I reset.

If framing matters, and it does, then CoVid19 needs better marketing. Like a brand it needs to go from cold to hot.

People change slowly. Think about your habits, your systems, and your patterns. Without a cause, most of us change very little even though we understand we aren’t fully optimized.

What probably has happened is that we’ve settled on a certain outcome in a range of outcomes that feels okay. Because people are relative thinkers, they find something slightly worse or better and compare themselves to that. In his Cowen Convo, Hal Varian thought people envied their prosperous neighbor more than a distant billionaire. And, because people tend to become more affluent over time, we can always compare how much better things are now. As a high school kid there were many times I only bought five dollars worth of gas.

We don’t change because change takes work. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Good changes come from creativity and a cause. One silver-lining of March 2020 is ample cause:

“A friend of mine who works for ESPN was telling me that the whole concept of televising sporting events with hundreds of people, with broadcast teams flying in for the games, maybe can’t happen anymore. They might have to use people on the ground for the games. I think there’s a creativity level that has to go way up.” – Bill Simmons podcast, 3/11/2020. 

Before leagues cancelled games and suspended seasons there was shock—shock I tell you!—at playing in empty gyms. Before we get worked up we can ask, does this already happen? Kinda, and the answer is staring us in the face: mascots.

Sports has acknowledged and embraced the fact that in-person games are not pure entertainment. The last baseball stadium I was in had a playground for kids. During my internship in minor-league baseball I passed up the chance (another story) to be the on-field entertainment. Half-court-shots-to-win-book-for-the-semester-money are part of every college season. 

Live sports acknowledged the fluff and did good work to solve for it. Streaming just the games makes sense.

There’s also potential for redoing the broadcasts. What if there was an API where fans could comment on their own? What if the NBA offered a game to Twitch with comments? What if players were mic’d up? “The whole concept for how this stuff is covered will have to change,” said Simmons. 

It’ll be different, and maybe even better.

Asking does this exists in some form is a great way to remind ourselves that nothing is permanent. The NBA was founded, is thriving, but will also cease to exist again. For sports or any business, March 2020 will force operators to ask ‘why do we do things this way?’ One helpful trail will be to ask how working from home, social distancing, or productive Twitter are already successfully accomplished. Someone has already addressed your problem, go find that solution.

This post first appeared on the POV40IQ newsletter.

We’ve written a lot about education: the XMBA, film school, and culinary un-school in France. There’s also the JTBD approach to choosing college. There’s so much written about school selection because there’s no great single metric. There are numbers like tuition, magazine rankings, and graduation rates and employment prospects. But there is no unifying or simple equations like when buying a television.

This makes college choice a funky problem. Most students optimize for cost, given some range from home. I’d imagine that comments like, it’s the same chemical atoms no matter where you go, is uttered many times in many places.

But just because there is a system doesn’t mean it’s a good system. Another way to choose in wicked environments is to select a single priority. Pro-choice or pro-life voters do a version of this.

When it comes to college then, here are three ways to think about one big thing that might matter more than all the other things and make a college choice easier*.

Are these the kind of people I wanted to be surrounded by? If someone is the average of the five people they spend the most time with, then this would be a good question to ask. Surfaced by Justin Mikolay, it’s not the kind of thing I thought about at eighteen, but seems obvious decades later.

At the time I thought college was college. One school was as good as another. However, certain schools like Mikolay’s Naval Academy are all together different. Think of this question as a form of positive-sampling-error.

Is this the fastest path? More young people now, than I remember as a young person, seem to want to optimize college like a weekend obstacle course race. If I can get this done first and take this shortcut I’ll be able to shave twenty-percent off my time. Morgan Housel tweets about the low-cost (time and money) aspect of this option.

This perspective makes sense. Colleges are still four years, even though students learn more in high school than ever before. Colleges are still going up in price, even though it seems like the supply should be optimized as well.

Is this the most educational? There are pockets of incredible opportunity in the college curriculum. Michael Mauboussin teaches at Columbia. Tyler Cowen teaches at George Mason and says how helpful the “Mason lunches” are.

The internet is amazing at information transfer but hasn’t (yet, will it ever?) offer the value of lunch in gif form?

That said, life life, college’s value is a sum of what someone puts into it. What these questions really might be is a forcing function. Answer and act.